


bow

by Hope



Series: bow 'verse (Lotrips AU) [1]
Category: Hetty Wainthrop Investigates, Interview With the Vampire, Lord of the Rings RPF, RPS, Shadow of the Vampire, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Faculty, The Ice Storm, The Lord of the Rings (Novel), lotrips
Genre: Alternate Universe, Crack Fic, Crossover, M/M, Vampires, minor characters - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-01-27
Updated: 2008-09-21
Packaged: 2017-10-02 00:01:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 27
Words: 32,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hope/pseuds/Hope
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>verb intrans</em></p><p>1 to submit or yield to something or somebody.<br/>2 to bend the head, body, or knee in respect, submission or greeting.</p><p> </p><p><em>noun</em></p><p>1 a bend or arch.<br/>2 a weapon consisting of a strip of flexible wood held bent by a strong cord connecting the two ends.<br/>3 a knot than can be pulled undone.<br/>4 an implement for playing a violin, etc, consisting of a resilient wooden rod with horsehairs stretched end to end.</p><p> </p><p><em>verb trans</em></p><p>1a to cause (a person or thing) to bend into a curve.<br/>b to weigh down or oppress somebody.<br/>2 to play (a stringed instrument) with a bow.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a repost of an old story - written over a couple of years, began December 2002, completed in January 2004. originally it was hosted at bow.dombillijah.com.
> 
> beta by trianne, [fanart](http://pics.livejournal.com/angstslashhope/gallery/0002dgg9) by various awesome people
> 
> **Supporting Cast**
> 
> Real People:
> 
> Sean Bean
> 
> Cate Blanchett
> 
> Billy Boyd
> 
> Orlando Bloom
> 
> John Rhys-Davies
> 
> Ian McKellen
> 
> Peter Jackson
> 
> Fran Walsh
> 
> Liv Tyler
> 
> Sarah Mcleod
> 
> F.W. Murnau (as portrayed by John Malkovich in Shadow of the Vampire)
> 
> Viggo Mortensen
> 
> Macauly Culkin
> 
> Sean Astin
> 
> Borrowed Characters:
> 
> Geoffrey Shawcross (as played by Dominic Monaghan in Hetty Wainthropp Investigates)
> 
> Casey Connor (as played by Elijah Wood in The Faculty)
> 
> Mikey Carver (as played by Elijah Wood in The Ice Storm)
> 
> Huckleberry Finn (as played by Elijah Wood in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn)
> 
> F.W. Murnau (as portrayed by John Malkovich in Shadow of the Vampire)
> 
> Claudia (as played by Kirsten Dunst in Interview With The Vampire)
> 
> Diamond ('of Long Cleeve', from JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings)

Dominic rides out of the building on a burst of sound, the cold not really hitting him until he's at the bottom of the steps, the stone gritty and yet still slick under his feet, every pebble and crack felt through his thin soles.

He shoves his hands deep into his pockets, balling them into fists and shifting them a little, futilely attempting to generate more heat in the friction between rough woven wool and tightly furled knuckles. The sound of music and laughter and aristocratic shrieks behind him is muffled to a dull cacophony as the huge doors swing shut, and he quickens his steps, flat click of his heels on slick cobblestones the only sound in the dark streets; empty but for the figures of steam rising from the drains, lit ethereally by oily halos of yellow street light.

Dominic lifts his hand from its warm nest of pocket momentarily - pressing it to his chest to feel the crackle of an envelope in his breast pocket, imagining he can feel the blurred edge of each bill. To complete the gesture he reaches up, tugging his cap firmer down over his forehead, wishing - not for the first time in his life - that his ears weren't so huge. By the time he got home and stoked the fire, he knew they would be burning and red like beacons.

Breathing briefly on his hands, he rubs them together then shoves them back in his pockets - ears he doesn't mind so much, but his hands are too valuable to get frostbitten. He squeezes his fists tight then releases, still feeling the buzz of waxed bow on string, the vibration of the notes through his throat, and the shock of cold air when he breathes in suddenly almost makes him choke.

The street is very quiet around him, but he imagines he can hear a symphony as he looks up at the cold, closed-lidded houses around him; stone cool and blue in the starlight above the harsh yellow of the street lamps. A symphony of sleeping breaths, murmurs, dreams, and maybe - a soft cry from an adjacent building and he grins - woken passions.

Unconsciously, he reaches up to pat his breast again, feeling the crinkle of the paper through threadbare jacket and shirt, and soft cotton undershirt. His heart leaps as if it feels the contact, and an image comes to mind, so fierce it seems to make the street darken around him - smooth curves and lips, polished, slick chestnut, elegant arch of neck, strings exquisitely taut . . . The cold cuts back in and the vision seems to retreat, or breathe out of Dominic on the clouds of his breath, the money in his pocket seeming to burn into his skin and fantasy fading as the reality comes back in as to what he'll _really_ have to use it for. Firewood. And food maybe, though that is less important at this time of year, when the promise of snow seems to catch at the back of his throat and make his eyes water. At least in the pawn shop he won't be able to make fuel of what fuels him.

He halts suddenly, brow furrowed and teeth clenched; but doesn't realise what made him stop until he hears it again. A soft cry, like a bowed note pressed too cruelly, an echo of sound from a dark, gaping mouth of an alleyway up ahead. Dominic starts walking again, slower, on the balls of his feet so his shoes sound like dulls slaps against the cobblestones; feeling the grit underfoot reverberate up through his spine as he slows his breathing, strains his ears.

He's barely breathing at all as he comes up to the maw, and it seems to cast darkness just as the street lamps - distant now - cast light, and his hands involuntarily rise, breath catching his throat as something abruptly emerges.

A cat - shrunken and skeletal, and he almost laughs but the cold is clutching at his chest and he's coughing, leaning over with hands on knees and still shaking a little as he realises what it is just as it's passing into the shadows on the opposite side. His heart is still pounding as he straightens up, almost as loud as the sound of his own breath in his ears and he wants to laugh again but can't, the eerie silence so recently torn by his coughing. And he _must_ look into the alleyway as he passes - if only to assure his mind that of the imagined cat fight; hissing and scratching over refuse, though there was little even of that to spare these days; licking the crusted residue out of discarded eggshells, perhaps.

It takes a while for his eyes to adjust - rising fog disappearing around him as a chill shifting of air pushes it from behind him, and he looks up to see a clear slice where the fog stops and the darkness begins, no light able to penetrate this dark space even to reflect on those tiny particles of damp.

And yet something is reflected.

Dominic stands still long enough for the twin gleams to manifest in the darkness ahead of him - close to the ground but not close enough to be a cat - until he steps almost involuntarily forward, refuse squelching underfoot and the stench of rot rising, unnoticed. The closer he gets the more seems to be revealed - there is white, though the thing seems to be chiefly black - though 'black' in itself seems an inadequate way to describe it - and something flutters up as he comes close enough to discern it - hands.

Large, unblinking eyes gaze up at him from amidst a white face, glowing in the dank alley through a sheen of grime. Hands pressed to breast - fingers the colour of bone, long and sculpted, tendons corded delicately.

"Hello," Dominic murmurs a little hoarsely, seeing with some degree of surprise his own hand reaching out in front of him, trembling slightly. "Are you all right?"

The boy doesn't answer, doesn't move as Dominic's hand brushes soft, tangled darkness above his forehead, then with some effort on Dominic's part, slides down to rest on his shoulder. _Homeless_, Dominic realises, _of course_ \- he's surprised that this is the first he's seen this night, and surprised that this boy is still here, really. . . He's left his room in the frigid dawn more than once to find bodies as white as this in alleys, motionless, staring.

But the boy is moving, gleaming eyes ascending as he rises from his crouch and Dominic wonders fleetingly, almost hysterically what he was doing there in the first place - fighting the cat for off-cuts? For unusable, inedible, inflammable refuse thrown from the open wounds of second-floor windows?

*

The boy looks different under the street lights - though his skin remains white even under that sickly yellow. He's shorter than Dominic had thought when he first stood, though possibly older, too - the strong jaw, cheekbones, and straight, almost aristocratic nose. His eyes reflect the cloudy thickness of the night, and Dominic thinks he might be blind until the boy turns his head sharply (Dominic must have turned away, missed that sudden movement) and they are black, white pinpricks of stars very distant in their depths.

His clothes are mismatched, confusing. Trousers almost worn completely through at the knee, fraying and weeping at the cuff, dark with filth even though they are too short to even touch the ground. Shirt obviously stained even in the yellow light of the lamp, collar rising a little like a priest's above the collar of a velvet jacket, rich brown, tucking in and then flaring at the boy's waist, obviously tailored and yet obviously too big for him; his hands emerging from dirty cuffs to clutch at Dominic's sleeves, knuckles shining.

"You must be cold," Dominic exclaims; the boy's feet are bare and he doesn't even seem to have a vest under his jacket.

_Pity_, Dominic thinks in a kind of daze as he offers the boy a place to sleep for the night, in front of a fire. _Pity and sympathy_. His gut twists as the boy walks beside him, feet silent on the slick cobblestones. Dominic swallows. He hadn't felt them for so long, is all.

*

It almost seems as if there is no one behind him but for the cold, making his shoulders crouch and itch against his shirt, and he steps carefully over the stairs that creak as he ascends to his room - wary of his sleeping landlady - though he can't tell if the boy does the same. The house is in eerie silence as Dominic fumbles with the icy iron of the heavy key, lifting it slightly in the lock to ease the door open, the boy waiting on the doorstep, eyes reflecting the cool, dense grey of the tiny landing before Dominic gestures wordlessly for him to enter.

Perhaps the boy is mute? It would explain much: generally it's the girls that are abandoned, sons are too valuable. And orphans generally have siblings; he'd learnt that from seeing many a team of pickpockets working the chaotic streets on what passed these dark days for a market. Dominic tosses his cap on the rickety table, directing the boy towards the threadbare armchair by the hearth, warning of its collapsed seat with a smile. The boy's lips twitch a little in response as he gracefully sinks into the worn, colourless fabric, legs folding beneath him. Dominic feels the ice of his gaze as he kneels before the tiny, blackened fire place, gathering what few pieces of kindling he has before blowing the coals back to life; ashes fluttering weakly as the orange glow cracks black surfaces. The hair on the back of his neck seems to have risen and the muscles in his thighs are almost painfully taut as he crouches, leaning forward to gather some larger pieces to fuel the weakly flickering tongues of flame-- He winces abruptly, dropping the rough, broken board with a dull clatter and hissing, shaking his hand.

Something cool closes around it - cooler even than Dominic's own hands - and the boy's eyes are black again, veins of red reflecting the fire as he draws Dominic's hand - finger beading brilliant ruby from the stab of the splinter - towards his mouth.

_Red_, Dominic thinks dully; the boy's lips are red against the pale pad of Dominic's finger, and a flush rises in his cheeks as his eyes slide closed. Dominic starts back.

"Well." He clears his throat. "The, er, fire . . . seems to be doing you a world of good." He stands suddenly, wavering, then stumbling a little and reaching towards for the bare mantel to steady himself. His bow rattles as he brushes it accidentally, the sound distant and anxious as it falls to the floor. He can't seem to pick it up, the only piece of wood in the room that he is unwilling to burn. His hand is numb. The boy is kneeling on the floor before him.

"Would you like some . . . tea?" Dominic asks, desperately averting his eyes from the boy's still face as he slowly rises, staring instead at the violin-curves of his body. His head is just beyond eye level of Dominic's chin.

"No thankyou," the boy murmurs, a flash of sharp white in his mouth, hand burning against the ice of Dominic's neck.

_Blue_, Dominic thinks as the boy leans closer and licks his lips; and it's Dominic who breaks eye contact first, lids sliding shut into heavy darkness before he even feels the touch of warm mouth and sharp teeth on his throat. The tiny fire flickers out.


	2. Chapter 2

There's grime and ash in the canyons between the bricks. The tiny freckles of grey roll towards him reluctantly, then hurtle away again, careening against the cratered surface of the worn mortar, cracked brick. Towards him, and away; fenced in with blurred black lines that he doesn't even realise are his eyelashes until they shift and the world disappears for a moment.

He can't feel the threadbare rug beneath his cheek, though there's a dull swollenness where the flesh is pressed between his teeth and the floor. He can't tell if his mouth is open or not and he can't seem to move it to find out. Not that he wants to. His throat is raw, as if scraped dry with sobs; and the sharp pain of the point of his hip pressed to gritty floorboards is the next sensation to return, though the rest of his limbs lie still and heavy as if they are made of wax.

His eyes hurt. His tongue touches the ridge behind his teeth on the roof of his mouth, and he can almost hear the dry friction of it. His jaw aches as he closes it, teeth not fitting together properly and the back of his throat swollen and taut as he tries to draw moisture. He tries to make a sound, fails; his ear is pressed against the floor and deafening him with an insistent rushing hiss. The floorboards creak. Dominic closes his eyes, and the darkness bears him up again.

*

His violin had curlicues, scrolled _f_s bordering her belly, and they seemed to cling to him when he traced his fingers over them, dark. Her voice was rich, like the echoing darkness within her and warm, rising from his bow like leafy shoots from warm soil. Like smoke wreathing the night, her throaty voice reverberating with red heat in his own heart, and deep in his own belly.

*

Dawn comes next and his mouth tastes like ashes. He can hear the landlady pacing about below; dull echoes that are too uneven to be his heartbeat. He wants to sit up but his head is filled with lead, weighing him down. His entire body aches with the need to untwist itself, to curl up and stretch out and straighten muscles long bent, but it's the burning ice of his feet that makes him move in the end; arms shaking as he pushes himself up, head lolling uselessly on his boneless neck; hands thick and heavy and blurring as he looks down at them, white and palm-flat on the faded burgundy of the rug.

Somehow he comes to lean against the chair; stout, fabric-wrapped wooden leg sharp against the line of his spine, and for some reason his neck still isn't working and he's left with the armrest bruising the back of his skull, the yellowish-brown stains where the wall joins the roof blurring in and out of focus. His hands are cold and heavy and foreign against his own face and it's not until the tiny, mostly-bare room is considerably lighter that he realises his shoes are gone.


	3. Chapter 3

Dominic doesn't have violinist's hands. They'd be better suited to hefting a pick-axe, shovelling, sorting through rubble perhaps; fingers long and blunt and anything but delicate. Wrists broad but in proportion, veins bold over sculpted tendons and knuckles. Powerful, but always under his control, curled around neck or bow with some kind of exquisite elegance.

His neck hurts like the first time he played, and his hands feel like they're trapped in gloves of wax, thick and unwieldy. The small room is as bare and empty as ever, a imperfect filigree of ice on the cracked windowpane softening as the sun sinks, bathing the west wall of the building in momentary warmth. The water's frozen in the pipes again, and when he musters enough energy to stumble to his feet, he washes his face with the icy water in the pitcher beside his bed before falling back, shuddering into thin blankets and sheets that he can barely feel against his numb skin.

At about nine, a harsh pounding lifts him out of dark dreams and he struggles with the thick blackness swaddling him, squinting at the whiteness seeping in through the crack under the door, shifting a little before silence falls again. He's not sure how much later it is when his eyes blur into vision again. He's not sure if he's been pulled out of sleep or if he was awake all along, but he can't lift his head and the space of bare floor by his bed is no longer empty. He's not sure how long it takes for him to realise that despite the fact that his boots are very still, they are not unoccupied, and he recognises the torn cuffs hanging over their tightly laced tops.

Dominic closes his eyes, a slow dip of lashes that almost sends him into sleep again, and when he opens them, the boots are gone. He sits up, head spinning. A soft tapping sound comes from the opposite side of the small room, and despite the fact that he's shivering all of a sudden, he swings his legs over the side of the bed and stands on feet that feel made of clay. Grit and dust press into his bare soles and he has to lean on the wall as he makes his way slowly to the arm chair. The fire isn't lit and the cold light of the moon flames through the unveiled window. His breath is like smoke.

"You're a musician," the boy says, his voice soft yet clear to Dominic's ears. Fine, white hands toy with his bow, tapping it absently against the arm of the collapsed chair. His feet are flat on the floor, now, Dominic's boots firmly planted. Dominic presses his back to the sooty stones that border the side of the fireplace, built up to his shoulders then receding and narrowing and disappearing into the roof. The boy stops tapping. His eyes are downcast and he runs one finger along the horsehair, the movement minutely grating as he pushes against the grain of it. Dominic remembers waxing it only the day before, lovingly bowing it along the block of rosin with long, lingering strokes.

The boy seems to be waiting for an answer, lashes fanned on white cheeks, cradling the bow in his hands, passive in his lap.

"Yes," Dominic croaks, his voice scraping out of his throat like a blade. He lifts a hand to his throat and it feels like ice against his skin. He swallows. The puffs of his breath are visible, agitated in the stillness of the room.

"What do you play?" Dominic thinks the boy might be a ghost, speaking to him casually, conversationally; and he wonders with a kind of exhausted hysteria whether he should offer to make a cup of tea again. The boy looks up.

"Violin," Dominic says, his voice caressing the word despite it's harsh, unused tone, rough like a minor key mingled with wood smoke. The boy is stroking the bow again, and suddenly Dominic wants it with an ache he can feel at the base of his throat. He wraps his arms around his chest. The skin tightens on his neck when he swallows, and it hurts. "Violin."

"Yes," the boy whispers, or Dominic thinks he whispers but he's dizzy again and he feels taut and stretched like a bowstring shifting and angling to caress the strings with a hoarse sob. The boy runs a finger along the tense line on the side of Dominic's throat and Dominic opens his eyes. The air is chaotic with the white clouds of his breath, but he's not sure if the boy's chest is even moving. The touch is like flame against Dominic's icy skin, and he remembers putting his hand on the black kettle when he was younger, feeling an odd numb cold before dropping it hastily. He imagines the mark the finger leaves; red and upraised. He's still wearing his coat and the envelope in the pocket crackles a little as the boy presses close and Dominic can smell his own sweat, distant; and snow, crisp and pure.

"Why do you play?" The boy murmurs, even his voice seeming white and ethereal, dissipating into the dense darkness until Dominic realises he's closed his eyes again, and struggles to open them. The boy's hand has dipped under the collar of his shirt and is resting on the tense, angular muscle where Dominic's shoulder joins the base of his neck. Dominic can't see his face, but raucous tangles of dark hair shift just below his line of vision, his head thrown back, pressed against the harsh brick, neck too weak to support the weight.

Dominic draws in a sudden, painful breath. "Money," he breathes. "I would starve if I didn't."

The boy withdraws, whole body pressed against Dominic one instant then only his hand, painful at the corner of Dominic's jaw, the next. _His eyes are blue_, Dominic thinks with a flush of surprise at the recollection, but the boy's mouth is colder this time at the point where Dominic's pulse pounds frantically; the sharp sting making his breath shudder and the world spin into an empty darkness.  



	4. Chapter 4

He tasted like music.

The first drop like a flush of heat, invoking a burst of colour around him, dense and rich and aching in a long, low note. The blood from his throat drew forth harmonies, minor keys and major, rhythm slowing as he was drained.

*

The doors crack open and a pair of figures burst out, lit from behind by bright, cloying light and lurid sound. The woman's voice is high-pitched, her laughter spewing out into the purity of the cold night. The two figures stumble apart as they come closer to him, and he moves forward, settling against the outside wall of an elaborate flight of stairs, curling up and pressing his body against the brick, covered with the oily light of the street lamp. He can hear rats crawling, digging in the foundations of the house, scratching at the mortar.

"Liv!" the man calls from the opposite side of the street, and the woman turns back as she's crossing; swaying a little, gloved hand pressed to her mouth. Her bosom heaves as she hiccups, and she flings her hand away from her mouth in a gesture that serves to upset her balance considerably. The man laughs, a harsh, guttural sound, "Goodnight!" and blows a kiss in return before weaving over the cobblestones and disappearing into shadow.

The woman laughs quietly, hiccuping again as stumbles over the kerb and towards the stairs. He shifts a little, makes a small noise. She stops.

Her face is pale but flushed under a layer of white powder, lips stung red and dark hair falling in wilting tendrils around her face, escaped from the ornate pins holding her hat in place. "Well hello there," she murmurs, leaning over before him; swaying a little before bracing herself with one hand on the immense scrolled stonework. "Are you lost?"

He nods his head, curling his body smaller in the fine velvet coat. His feet are bare again. She cups his chin with her free hand, tilts his face up. "Where are your parents?" He keeps his mouth closed, his eyes fill with tears. "What's your name?"

"Elijah," he whispers.

She has a collar around her throat, a velvet band with a cameo on it like a bone, so he bites into the smooth swell at the top of her breast, hands tight around her upper arms. She struggles only a little, legs giving way and folding awkwardly, feet scraping a little at the icy cobblestones, gloved hands beating weakly at his shoulders before she makes a small noise and her head falls back.

She tastes like the bitter burn of alcohol, discordant and sickly sweet, turning sour with her struggles and he drags her further back into shadow as she finally stills; wiping his mouth and shuddering a little with the nauseous heat that flows through him. Her boots are too impractical, too out of place with his already mismatched clothes, but it doesn't matter because that isn't the reason he's taken her.

He can still feel the dull clash of music from further up the street, writhing through the tortured cobblestones, echoing through the cavities of the sewers below. He pulls the cameo from her throat before he leaves, and peels one dark glove of a limp hand, examining a ring on her finger before sliding it off with his mouth.

*

That music. He can recall it, like a distant dream or memory - clearer than any he's had for a long time, and yet not clear _enough_. Like a voice but from somewhere deeper, he can still see the swirl of it around the softening body; darker, richer than blood. Calling to him beyond the smell of life, and the quickening and slowing rhythm of a heartbeat.

He hisses. The dissonant sounds are slowing and he can already smell the dank wet of melting snow. The sun is rising.


	5. Chapter 5

"Dommie, where've you been?"

Dominic starts at the voice, flinching back into the dusky brown darkness of the small room, instrument cases leaping to attention against his back. He relaxes just as abruptly, leaning down again to pull the battered violin case from underneath several collapsed music stands, holding it to his chest and running his palm over the cracked leather.

"You look like death. Have you been ill?"

Dominic shakes his head, the gesture ending as a half-hearted shrug.

"Ian was a bit put out that his fiddler didn't show last night. I ran up to your place on our mid-evening break and banged on the door for a bit, but no one was answering. Is everything all right?"

Dominic half-shrugs again, his shoulders slumping, and avoids the other man's eyes. It 's cold, and he has a scratchy grey scarf wrapped around his neck, swaddling up to his chin and down below his jacket collar. He curls his toes in his boots, shifting his balance from foot to foot. "No, no trouble I just . . . Wasn't feeling up to it, is all."

The shorter man quirks an eyebrow. "Try telling that to them out there." He jerks a thumb over his shoulder. Dominic follows him out of the imposing clutter of the room then jolts suddenly into him as he stops again. "You aren't in any trouble are you, Dommie?"

Dominic frowns, his mind moving sluggishly around the words, a glacial understanding. "No!" he says, laughing shortly. "No trouble, Billy. Not that kind of trouble."

*

The violin hurts his neck. He closes his eyes as he plays, the gaudy swirling of colours below and before him making his stomach clench. The rich voice of the violin reverberates through his skin, his tightly clenched jaw, scraping at nerves too sensitive to enjoy it. Billy leans forward to elbow him sharply in the side as the crowd shifts patterns again before them, noticeably more sluggish than they were only a few hours earlier. "You could have told me it was a lass."

Dominic looks up at him, startled, the movement pulling painfully at the skin of his throat. "What was a lass?"

Billy chucks him under the chin, grinning. "Your love bites, Dommie," he says with a wink. "Was she worth risking your job?"

The insistent tap-tap of the conductor's baton prevents Dominic from answering, lifting his bow as instruments rise around him, poised for an endless moment as if on the edge of an abyss, then falling into sound and movement again.

*

Dominic lingers late after the music has stopped, carefully laying the borrowed violin back in its case as if it's made of crystal, loosening the bowstrings so slowly it seems the bow is relaxing gradually in his hands rather than simply slackening.

"You want to come home for a smoke?" Billy asks, shoulders askew as he shrugs on his coat with one arm, the other weighed down with his own instrument case, the thin wood buckled from the cold and damp. Dominic looks up into Billy's earnest face from where he sits on the front of the stage, thinking of his small, clean house; his wife, his young daughter.

Dominic forces himself to smile, shaking his head and wrapping the scarf back around his neck with slow, deliberate movements. Billy smiles in return, squeezing Dominic's shoulder before heading for the double doors and beyond, the sound of his steps rising quick and even along the empty dance floor.

*

He knows he's being followed.

The sound of his own footsteps echo up behind him, crunching slightly the thin layer of slushy snow left over from the day's comings and goings. The air is heavy, still, tense with anticipation of snow, and Dominic imagines he can hear the sharp chimes of icicles forming. His breath shivers ahead of him.

He slows inexplicably as he gets closer to home until he comes to a halt, standing with his forehead pressed against the peeling paint on the front door, key gripped tight in his fist, deep in his pocket. He closes his eyes and it feels as if the house is pressing back on him, then he fumbles with the key and leaps up the stairs.

The room is empty. Dominic's back is pressed against the closed door behind him. Through the window opposite he sees the air gradually turn white, snow build up quickly on the tiny window ledge. The room is empty, but something glints at in the corner of Dominic's eye as he struggles at tinder and flint with shaking hands. His bow, resting as if placed carefully on the floor in front of the armchair, and something else with it . . . Abandoning the fireplace, Dominic crawls towards it.

The ring is like ice in his numb hands, small and heavy, frozen diamonds glinting. His breath catches in his throat as he rolls it between his fingers, the silvery light in the room darkening as snow masks the windowpane from the outside. The ring is worth more than everything in the room combined, he can tell just by looking at it, touching it, small as it is. His knees grind painfully against the dusty floorboards as sits up, feeling with his free hand for his bow, anticipating --

Finding something else. The delicate, carved features of a cameo, recognisable even under his nerveless thumb, pinned on a band of rough velvet. He closes his eyes for a moment, tries to swallow around the panic rising frantically, cutting off his breath. _If I'm found with this . . ._ He doesn't want to know how the boy came to have it. Came to leave it here. He refuses to even consider _why_.

He winces suddenly, opening his fist and hissing a breath in through his teeth. The cameo clatters on the floor boards and in the dark he can feel the warm stickiness of blood filling his palm, oozing through clenched fingers. He closes his eyes, swallows. The room is empty.


	6. Chapter 6

There are bats in the sewers, dripping obscenely from curved ceilings. Every high pitched squeak, every fluttering re-arrangement of wings echoes with a kind of high, wet emptiness, bouncing back and fading almost immediately.

He emerges as the moon rises, keeping close to buildings; avoiding leaving footsteps by scaling walls, moving with cool fluidity over peaked rooftops. The streets are empty but for the piercing white of the snow, brightening the night enough to make him hiss and squint; and the solid blue shadows, melting from the buildings as the moon arcs above.

He can smell the coppery density of blood even before he leaves the gaping openness of the sky, and hear the slow, muffled beating of a heart, pounding as if keeping a rhythm for him alone. When he enters the room the sensations are closer, clearer; he licks his lips.

The ring and cameo are on the floor where he left them, but the bow is once again resting on the mantel, gleaming almost imperceptibly in thick shadow, the rest of the room cast softly in red from coals still glowing faintly with life.

There is a figure sleeping on the bed, dark shroud of blanket hunched up over shoulders, face turned down and into the dense curve of folded arms. The sound of breathing is loud in the room, and it stops then quickens as the figure opens its eyes, blinking slowly and shifting its head.

He steps back quickly into the fold of shadow next to the protruding fireplace, watches as light glitters and reflects off sleep-drenched eyes, and the exquisite colour of bruised flesh.

"Who are you?" The voice is rough, slurred; he can hear rich chords of fear beneath the surface. "Why did you bring me that jewelery?"

"Money," he whispers, casting the sound so it echoes from the stained plaster roof, the dusty cornice above the window, the depths of the fireplace. He longs to step forward, but has learnt long ago that only some desires are to be consummated. The heartbeat quickens.

"I can't use it," a whisper, soft and almost desperate. "That cameo . . . It would be recognised, if I tried to sell them. It would be madness."

"Madness . . ." He's moved forward now, tasting how the notes curl around his teeth and through lips moist with anticipation. The breath catches at his approach; at the movement too fast for mortal perception. He's closer to the bed now, still out of reach.

"What do you want?" breathless, notes climbing with aching progression, but the man's throat moves as he swallows convulsively, blanket sliding from his shoulders sluggishly as he shifts, tilts his head back.

Elijah moves forward again. "_What do you want?_" he whispers, tongue laving skin before he bites through to the heartbeat beneath, mouth closing over violated flesh; the answer to his question in the thick taste of copper in his mouth, dense like shadow and rich like notes cascading over each other, the low ache of bow on string.

He licks the wounds a little before drawing back. The figure is still again, eyes half-lidded, and the jaw line is blunt, casting the side of the throat in deep shadow. Elijah withdraws. The bow fits in his hand and heat courses through him, limbs tingling in sensation that seems unfamiliar every time but longed for always, an echo of life. He feels cold. His shoulders ache, and the pads of his fingers. He feels the firm press of the violin against the side of his neck, the low, moaning throb moving through him as he draws a note from it, and it hurts. The heartbeat seems to move in time with it. Elijah knows what he wants.


	7. Chapter 7

Dominic dreams.

He's looking for something, walking through the huge, open rooms of a house; glowing gold with furniture polish and sunlight and dust suspended in the air. Each room he enters he forgets the details of the one previous, the couches and chairs and tables all reclining with an indifferent stillness and he's getting more and more frustrated.

He can hear music, distant and slightly muffled, the same phrase repeated over and over without pause in between. The rich notes of a violin, aching through the dancing motes of light. Dominic is frantic.

*

He wakes late in the afternoon, limbs heavy, brief glimpse of dying sunlight curling around his back like a sleepy lover. He stretches, lies still. He hears the front door slam, the creak and rattle of water in the pipes, a hidden latticework of copper and iron in the wall behind his bed.

A low, pleasant ache washes through him as he stands, rolling his shoulders, hairs on his forearms rising with a flush of heat. The cameo and the ring have gone from the floor before the collapsed armchair, and his bow is set at a slight angle on the mantel, closer to the door than where he set it the night before. The metal plating on it is cool between his fingertips, weight slight and familiar. The strings are taut, and he twists the nut at the end of it slightly, ridged between his fingers, and smiles as the arched wood relaxes, horsehair suddenly soft and plump where it was tight and sharp.

The belly of the stove is empty but for an uneven crest of ash, so he splashes cold water from the taps over his face, shucking off his shirt to replace it with a fresh one, clean fabric stiff and scratchy against his forearms. He fumbles for the envelope in the breast pocket of his jacket, swinging by the collar from his outstretched hand, and the paper's soft, fibres separating at the corners, when he finally retrieves it.

The sun sets while he decides where to put it, not sure of what is safe and secure in this small, bare room any longer, then opens his eyes and briskly shakes his head - trying not to relish the tender twinge in his neck at the movement - and kneels before the hearth.

The fibres of the dusky burgundy rug are sharp against his knees, even through the ridges of corduroy trousers, but he ignores the shifting sting as he crouches over, blowing away dust and ash before prying blunt fingernails into the cracks where the mortar appears to have been scratched away. The cavity that's revealed when he pulls away the brick is dustless but for a few smudges of ash fallen only moments ago, and Dominic sits back on his heels for a moment, withdrawing the precious few bills from the crinkled envelope. Carefully he unfolds them, and slides them in to the envelope pressed flat by the weight of the brick, stiff with only a few adamant creases that appear to have been ironed into the paper. When the brick is firmly back in place again, he uses the flat edge of his hand to brush the dust back into the too-clean cracks around it, even taking a half-handful of ash from the fireplace and scattering it with held breath.

By the time he rises it is thoroughly dark, and the empty envelope is like a rectangle of snow in his hand. He pulls his jacket on again and carefully places his bow back on the centre of the mantel, sitting atop the empty envelope as if guarding it. He will use it later for tinder - he can't afford newspapers and paper is a luxury he looks forward to when it comes to lighting fires.

*

Dominic keeps his eyes closed again as he plays through the night, dizzying colours and movement and sound fading around him until he's only aware of the subtle vibration of notes, as if he's become the violin and the violin his bow, pressing against his body with the poignancy of long, sure strokes. He aches.

*

He tries to stay awake, sitting for a while low in the collapsed armchair, not feeling the thick thread of the worn upholstery as his calloused fingers stroke over it absently. When the candle gutters on the corner of the mantel he curls his feet up under him, squeezing his arms tighter around his chest, and focuses on the dim, fractured moonlight fluttering down the chimney to alight on the debris in the cold fireplace.

When he wakes at dawn his bow has moved again, at an angle on the edge of the mantel farthest from the pool of wax. The envelope is full.


	8. Chapter 8

He hasn't seen him for a more than a week. Dominic tries to stay awake but the landslide into sleep always claims him, struggling against the rubble of dark and dreams, suffocating dust. The envelope is always full in the morning - or late afternoon, when he finally wakes up; sluggish and still more than half-swaddled in the heaviness of sleep.

He holds the money carefully, transferring crisp, flat notes quickly to the cool, gritty space beneath the brick. He is never hungry enough to spend much of it; where he once always seemed to be ravenous, now the smell of the clean bills as he hands them over sickens him, and he watches the remains of the food spoil as he curls in the armchair before the brightly burning hearth.

At night he burns fragments of wood, faded paint flaking off it as if trying to escape; wood polished by long use; sometimes even carved into recognisable shapes - a crude horse head, a wheel. Whatever he can afford, and others can part with. He touches his bow almost hesitantly, heat of the fire harsh against his legs, falling back into spinning darkness behind closed eyelids.

The fire is always out by the time he wakes, and he doesn't light it until he gets home again and the room is blue-silver with starlight reflected on snow, or indigo in suffocated darkness. His fingers hurt as he snaps the wood, shoulders aching and neck not hurting enough. His hands tremble as he feeds the tiny flames. He always plays hard, fingertips dancing over strings or pressing firm, hand curled loosely but tense around the end of the bow.

When the boy comes again Dominic isn't sure if he's dreaming or not - the room is dark, window masked with snow again, and he seems to glow with a kind of cold light. The boy has shoes again, Dominic notices as he rises from the chair; black and well-made, they seem to be only recently polished and cared for but for the muck and filth covering them. The knees of the boy's trousers are dark and the cuffs of his jacket are wet against Dominic's face as he is pushed back into the armchair, the boy swarming up onto him, knees on either side of Dominic's thighs, hands cupping Dominic's jaw and tilting his head back, body curled over him but barely touching but for the burning ice of his lips under Dominic's chin.

_I have to stop thinking of him as a boy_, Dominic thinks, and asks "What's your name?" in a whisper that has to force its way past a shudder in his throat, a wave of heat flushing through him as teeth break through the soft skin under his jaw. The boy's tongue snakes out to press against the tiny wounds and Dominic closes his eyes, sensing the rising heat like a flame pressing down above him. He lifts his hands, but the roughness of velvet under his fingers lasts only a moment, and the boy is standing by the door again. Dominic's vision is swimming. The boy's face is flushed, his mouth red, and he wipes it with the back of his hand. Then the room is empty again.

*

One morning Dominic gets up earlier than usual - startled out of a shallow dream he doesn't remember by the icy fingers of dawn - and leaves the heated closeness of the room see the streets still pristine with snow.

They aren't pristine, of course - winter or not, the streets are never empty before sunrise, but they aren't crowded, either; so Dominic is the first to see the hand, freckled with snow and still, gloved and open as if beckoning him further into the alley to find its owner.

Her eyes are half-lidded, skin blue. A woman, curls dense and raucous around her head, her lips purple to match the violet of her dress, marred in its darkness now with a dusting of snow. She has a small bag looped around one wrist; more of a pouch, really - fine velvet matching her dress and the mouth of it gaping open obscenely, drawstrings loose. The marks on her neck are clean, no sign of blood, two holes open as if gasping in supplication, and the skin around them is white.

There are snowflakes caught in her eyelashes; or maybe frozen tears. Dominic has to clamp a hand hard over his mouth, his vision swimming as he stumbles out of the alley, thick snow dragging at his feet, fiercely cold air sharp in his face, his eyes. As he approaches the pawn shop, its highly-polished windows seeming to glow from within, he has to stop; retching futilely in a short, dank alleyway only a few yards before it, empty stomach heaving before he lurches upright again, knees cold and wet, and half-runs in the opposite direction.

The only thing he remembers of the walk home is the muddy slush of snow underfoot, icy and treacherous, tramped brown and filthy by less than an hour of morning's feet.


	9. Chapter 9

Elijah avoids touching the bow, sliding the envelope out from beneath it carefully. The surface is chaotic with fingerprints, and the sound of breathing echoes around the close room, slow sounds folding back and back, pressing in on him.

*

"How many is that now, sir?"

"Four, since the start of the week." He looks up from where he's examining the snow, sees the young man angle his head a little to peer up the corpse's skirt. "Constable."

He waits until the constable straightens again, grinning sheepishly, then gestures over his shoulder. The corpse is lifted on the make-shift stretcher, covered shapelessly with a coarse, stained sheet; limbs frozen with more than the cold. The mid-morning crowds haven't emerged yet from the tense, stretched houses bordering the street, and the constable steps carefully over the muddied ruts, feet crunching cautiously in still-white snow, back turned from the tiny procession making its way awkwardly up the road.

He licks the tip of his pencil absently, turns another page on his notebook, thin paper crackling loudly.

"No footprints again, sir?"

He glances up at the young constable - scarcely more than a boy, cheeks flushed in the crisp morning, eyes as vacant as the smoky glass windows peering into each other, high above them. He looks back down.

"No blood either then, sir?"

He sighs, glancing up to the grey sky before taking careful, measured strides back out of the alleyway and into the muddy slush of the street; handing the constable a small purple bag as he passes. "What am I meant to do with this, sir?"

He turns again. There isn't much to show that the woman was ever there - a slight imperfection in the soft shape of snow; still pure and white but for where their footprints made dark marks around her. No blood, no sign of a struggle. He tries to imagine how she died - sinking slowly as if she'd fallen with the snow, white and cold and empty. Except for the bag, though.  
"Evidence," he says, looking back at the blank face of the constable. The young man blinks, then starts forward after him.

*

"Inspector Bean," the commissioner sighs, leaning back in his chair and cupping his hand around the bowl of his pipe.

"Commissioner," he answers, standing just inside the door until a gesture from the other man directs him to sit. The commissioner leans forward, attention still directed on the pipe as he draws on it, thick tobacco smoke rising and masking the round, bearded face momentarily.

"Another one this morning, then?" the commissioner asks, finally leaning back and looking up at Sean.

The inspector nodded. "Fourth this week, sir - another woman."

"Money gone?"

"Yes, but nothing else - jewelery all still in place, fur."

The commissioner draws on his pipe again, lips pursing around the stem as he studies the ceiling intently. "Another one of the gentry then?"

"Yes sir - one of the Mcleod daughters. Sarah."

"Cause of death?"

"Unknown as of yet, though I suspect it may be poisoning . . ."

The commissioner makes a short sound of dissatisfaction. "Poisoning? For a robbery?"

"But it's not just a robbery, commissioner, if it were then--"

"Poisoning for a robbery seems a bit elaborate, don't you think? A robber with enough resources - not to mention _intelligence_ \- to use poison wouldn't be bothering himself with tipsy ladies wandering home late at night."

"But sir, it _isn't_ only ladies; for months now bodies have been found, almost every morning. Beggars, boys from the mines . . ."

"It's been a cold winter. It's to be expected that those without proper shelter will be lost to the elements."

"Sir--"

The commissioner stands, tapping his pipe absently on the edge of the table and rubbing his temples with the fingers of the other hand. "Let me know when you find out the cause of death, Inspector. I expect another autopsy is in store."

Sean sighs. "Yes Commissioner."

*

Sometime before dawn Dominic wakes, alert instantly to the cool hand pushing fabric over his shoulder, the back of his neck. His eyelashes brush against the pillow, the rough sound echoing loudly in his muffled ears. The hand settles on the curve of his shoulder, and he shivers a little as cool lips gradually warm on his neck. The room is silent except for his breathing, his body numb in wake of a wave of heat, except for the pounding of his heart where a tongue presses against his skin.

The room is soon icy again and his limbs are weak, his face feels wet; though he can't tell if it's from perspiration or from the cold. Or both.


	10. Chapter 10

Dominic takes the stairs two at a time, leaping down over the final three steps and feeling the solid jar of impact in his ankles. There's a policeman in the street outside - tall dirty-blond and solid in a dusky blue uniform that's more of a grimy black, open notebook in one hand; and more of them hefting something white-draped and shapeless to hip height.

He has money in his pocket, thick paper bills that he can feel on his thigh when he walks, bending reluctantly through corduroy against his skin. The snow is already wet and brown beneath his feet, staining the worn leather of his boots darker as he strides through it. The letters on the shop front are dark against the glow from inside; **JACKSON AND SONS**, then lower, completing the curved frame of letters: **WE BUY AND SELL**.

He turns before he gets to it, veering sharply into a side-street that opens up on his left. His heart is pounding so he quiets it with the acid heat of rum, burning down his throat and spreading harsh fingers across his chest.

He's not sure if he's awake or not; hearing the noise of the street, the people, as if swaddled in wool, oily and thick. The bottle is heavy in his hand, glass neck slippery and cool beneath the crumpled paper, and his fingers feel stiff and unwieldy. He barely feels the hand on his thigh but a screech of "_Huckleberry!_" makes him blink blearily, head swinging around in time to see a harried-looking woman nod her head at him nervously and back away, dragging an unkempt-looking boy from Dominic's pocket by the ear.

He watches the street-lamps being lit from the broad, sweeping steps of a closed-faced townhouse, then watches as the streets empty of brown, work-stained clothes to be replaced with gaudy silks, powdered flesh. The music starts up - he can hear it from where he sits, fingers freezing and ears burning, breath smoking - harsh and otherworldly as it echoes back through the streets to him, and he lurches to his feet.

As Dominic fumbles with his key, he drops the bottle; amber liquid bleeding into fresh snow and he's being pressed into the door, facing the street suddenly with ridged wood pressing into his shoulder blades. His jacket buttons are undone and nimble hands slide in under fabric, hot and drawing a deep-boned shudder up through him; heartbeat quickening almost painfully as he looks down into the flushed face, eyes dark blue like night sky reflected in second storey windows. The back of his head hurts against the carved wood of the door; his whole body tense as if a line of flame is pressing against him, igniting him with anticipation.

Dominic's alone again, and still shaking when he shuts his door behind him; the cold, stale air of the tiny room sharp in his throat. He can feel each fibre of the fabric lining his jacket, rough against his hands, skin suddenly burning and alive. Money. Money in his breast pocket, and something hard to swallow in his throat; heart beating ahead of itself and making his legs weak; he can feel every muscle in them tensed, every inch of skin aware of the cloth or air stroking against them. He unbuckles his belt, stumbles to the bed.

*

He carefully draws the cloth up over the frozen face. It's started to snow again, and people hurry past the small crowd of dark blue, averting their eyes from the lifeless figure half-buried in white.

"How many is that now, sir?"

Sean pulls out his notebook again, fumbling for it in his breast pocket. "Seven."


	11. Chapter 11

The violin isn't in the store room.

"Dominic." He turns around, can almost taste his heart in his mouth, coppery ache under his tongue. "A moment, please?"

Dominic stands silently, eyes cast down to watch the battered case turn idly in long fingers, skin stretched and loose with age. "We missed our violin last night."

Dominic doesn't speak, doesn't know if he wants to speak yet. His pockets are empty tonight and when he presses his tongue to the roof of his mouth he thinks he can taste the gritty cold of his room. Warm fingers under his chin surprise him and he looks up, involuntarily.

"My dear boy."

Dominic casts his eyes down again, thinking about the snow outside, and the softness of the ashes in the grate of his small fireplace, but glances up again as the silence continues. "Mr McKellan, I--"

"Music is all about emotion," Ian shifts his hand to touch a tender spot under Dominic's jaw for a moment, then withdraws again before handing Dominic the violin case with both hands. "But a measure of control is needed." He gazes at Dominic gravely. Dominic stares back, face expressionless, the cracked leather rough in his hands. "In all situations. I expect you won't miss another night."

Dominic shakes his head and follows the man out into the main hall, watching the lean body continue to sway forward across the gradually filling dance floor, halting at the door and making another elaborate gesture of welcome as a ruffled lady enters. Dominic climbs up onto the stage, bent metal music stands digging in at hip-height, paper scattering.

There's another man in his seat. He has his back to Dominic, charcoal collar slouched low, one elbow resting on the chair-back, body shifting as he laughs.

"Dom!" Billy exclaims, and the man turns. "This is Orlando. New chap. From across town. Started last night."

Orlando stands, hunched over a little and slightly taller than Dominic. The bottom button of his jacket is undone, and Dominic has a glimpse of untucked shirt as Orlando leans forward to shake his hand.

*

Elijah watches as the man emerges from the hall. He's not alone. Snowflakes flash in front of Elijah's eyes, careening fragments of uniqueness, white in the dense darkness. One of the figures leaves him at the base of the steps, waves before disappearing into a street on the right, and the two remaining approach Elijah's hiding spot slowly. The man's head is bowed, scarf like heavy folds of shadow muffling his neck, hiding his mouth, ears protruding beneath the rough weave of his cap. His hands are thrust deep in his pockets but the other's gesture animatedly, and Elijah can hear the incessant rhythm of his eager voice, see the darker sheen of his skin.

He follows their progress silently over the rooftops, crouching at the peak of the house like an icy gargoyle as he sees the man stop at his doorway, fumbling for his key before turning back to the other. His voice rumbles like coals, soaking into the delicate fibres of the snow sinking around them, and the other claps him on the shoulder, his reply loud and bouncing off cold brick before he continues onward down the street. Elijah follows the heated progress of the man walking up the stairs, collapsing into the armchair, heartbeat slowing as he stills.

He can hear the distant crunch of snow as the other walks steadily onward, and the low buzzing at odds with the icy chime in the air as he hums under his breath.

The sky is empty, pregnant moon floundering somewhere beyond the horizon as Elijah turns swiftly, moving silent-footed across the rooftop and then momentarily mid-air as before he lands in a crouch on the one adjacent, and then the next, and the next. The streets are silent but for the bat-squeaks pitched like stars, invisible in the sky above him, and then a crunch of snow from somewhere below. He pauses as a woman's voice vibrates up through the beams and into the icy shingles, _"Casey Connor, get back in here before you catch your death!"_, and he wraps white hands tightly about the curled wood at the apex of the house before leaning forward, gazing down.

The boy is hatless; hair brown and limp over his forehead, clothes faded and too large for him. He sighs and lowers his head as he closes the door behind him, then glances up the street and down again before tilting his head back and closing his eyes, a slow grin creeping over his mouth as snowflakes are drawn to his face.

Elijah has no money and his hunger gnaws at him along with the memory of something else; the low melody of a tune hummed at odds with the night, and a hand warm against the dark familiarity of the man's jacket.

The boy is crouched when Elijah lets go of the roof, pushing away, and his body under Elijah's is fine-boned, giving easily. Most of the impact is taken by the fine blanket of snow underneath him. Elijah pulls the head back as he ducks, closing his mouth down on warm flesh and sucking hard. He shudders as sharp, bitter heat floods him, steams from his mouth. The boys hands hold only melted snow when he turns the body over, eyes still half-lidded and mouth open in surprise.

When the door opens again his feet are steady on the wet wood of the door frame, cracked brick mapping the skin of his cheek as he presses his face to it. He pulls himself onto the roof again, torn strips of cloud now scattered above the rooves on the horizon, and he pushes away from the shingle underfoot again, trying to reach them before the sun.


	12. Chapter 12

"Three pints, please," Billy's voice is mellow, melodic in the smoke-thick air of the pub, and Dominic sinks into a narrow chair pushed flush against the wall, rough fibres of the wood catching at his jacket as he slides down. He carefully manoeuvres his knees under the low table, rubbing his hands over the top of his thighs absently as Orlando drops into the chair beside him, all mouth and teeth and grin.

The earthenware mug is warm underneath Dominic's fingers and he curls his hand around it before lifting it to his mouth - bitter yeast-taste lukewarm and prickling in his throat - and he curls the corner of his mouth up in a half smile when he lowers the mug, catching Orlando with his own drink half-raised and watching as Dominic absently licks his lips.

"So," Billy clears his throat. "Orlando - been playing for long?"

Dominic shifts his focus, Orlando's eager voice and crunch-edged accent fading into the background with Billy's soft, wordless noises of encouragement as he looks to the door, the rough-hewn bar, the dark, smoky depths at the back of the pub. The air is thick with rough noise, low groans and shouts of laughter, the dull, hollow-stone impact of mugs on tables. The constant murmur of voices curling around behind his ears and oozing over the top; he's hot and shiveringsweatcold inside his jacket, the air is too thick for him to breathe.

"Dom," Billy's hand on his forearm makes him start, and the beer sloshes over the uneven rim of the mug and onto the tense curve of his hand. "Are you alright? Do you want another?"

Dominic peers into his mug but his eyes still don't seem to want to focus; he glances up again and thinks he can see each particle of smoke and dust vibrating with sound in front of the huge open fireplace; spitting yellow light out into the dusky room. Dominic shrugs and half-smiles to a point somewhere beyond Billy's shoulder, then has to drop his eyes as Billy rises and the air swirls around him like displaced water, curling and crashing.

Orlando's looking at him expectantly when he raises his eyes again, and Billy's taken his mug so he has nothing to hold, to close his fingers around. He thinks of his bow. He didn't light the fire before he left and so he thinks the stick will be cold, smooth and slick between his fingers; the polish cracked so finely that he can only feel the tug and pull of the lines on his fingerprints if he stops breathing.

*

"I think you should walk Dominic home." He thinks Billy's voice is trapped, crushed note by note by falling snowflakes as the sound moves through the air between them. Dominic's mouth feels like it's coated in rosin, heady and sharp. Everything seems white around them, but he can see sharp black corners of buildings out of the corner of his eye, disappearing when he swings 'round.

"Whoa," a low buzzing murmur of sound, and a subtle pressure somewhere between his ribs and his hips, then the snowflakes are rushing towards him, brighter and thicker than stars in the black above.

He can't tell the difference between Orlando's voice and the crunch of snow underfoot, and the world is alternately white and black. Something's flitting over the rooftops alongside them; Orlando doesn't seem to notice but Dominic thinks it might be a bat or an owl; but the world is silent outside the crushing cocoon of Orlando's unevenly lilting voice.

He thinks that something's watching them, as Orlando manoeuvres him awkwardly to lean against the wall of the house, hard ice against his back. Orlando is still speaking but the sound seems to be flowing somewhere behind him, and when Orlando turns his head a dull, muffling silence fills the world.

Dominic's neck tingles when Orlando touches the heavy scarf, and Dominic's body feels full, and heavy, and sluggish when he hunches his shoulders away and grasps in his pocket with numb fingers for his key. Orlando stands back. He's speaking again but Dominic can't really tell what he's saying as he presses his hands against the wood of the door, then the only sound is his ragged breath as he leans his back against it, closed behind him.

*

The commissioner has a headache. The stem of pipe is bitter in his mouth and not even the sharp edge of brandy in his teacup is enough to stop the pounding on the back of his skull.

"Inspector Bean," he says, rubbing at his temples with cold, sweaty fingers. The man sitting across from him is painfully well-groomed, hair perfectly parted even after he takes off his hat and holds it in his lap, heavy blue coat folded over one arm.

"Commissioner Rhys-Davies." Even Bean's voice is clean and smooth, especially compared to the morning-after growl the commissioner is sporting.

"How many is that now, then?" A pained sigh as he splashes another stream of lukewarm tea into the cup.

"Nine, sir."

The commissioner rubs his beard absently, then winces at the abrasion. "Autopsies?"

"Inconclusive, sir. No fatal wounds showed up, though we examined the internal organs for signs of poisoning - no evidence there either, except perhaps a lack of bleeding."

Commissioner Rhys-Davies waves his hand dismissively. "It's cold. The blood's likely to freeze in their veins, if anything. No signs of poisoning, then?" He closes his eyes again, rubbing his face with his hand. "Have you looked for signs of the plague?"

Bean is silent for a moment, and the commissioner forces himself to keep his eyes on the desk, stubbornly refusing to look up at the man and admit Bean's collectedness in the face of his hung over senior. "I didn't ask the coroner to specifically, sir, though I'm sure his examination was quite tho--"

"Well see to it that you do." It was too early in the morning to be discussing such things. And far to bright. Pickpockets and vandalism, that's all the commissioner wanted to be dealing with in this city. At this time of the year, when it was cold enough for all the criminals to die off in the cold.

*

"It's ten, sir," the young constable says as he scurries along in the wake Inspector Bean's purposeful strides up the narrow hall. "Or eleven, even."

"Eleven what?" Sean murmurs absently, thinking of snow and footprints and blood.

"Eleven bodies, sir. Why, we got woke up not two nights ago to a right screaming from a street over - some poor missis found her son outside the doorway - still warm he was, though barely. No sign of stabbing or strangling. Just lying there like he was taking a sleep, except it looked like someone'd given him a punch in the throat. Or a bite, anyway, as if from a rat or something. There wouldn't have been much time for a bruise to form."

Inspector Bean halts half-way down the gritty stone steps in front of the station, eyes absently flicking over the dull, wet brown of the street; carts heaving violently through the muddied ruts, bent-backed women struggling out of the way and tall men with top hats gleaming like black blood, wet. "And the eleventh?"

"Just last night, sir. Me mam told me about it this morning. The Finns, just a few houses down from us. Lost their little boy. Found him this morning. Know the one? Always coming up with excuses as to why he's got his hands in some lady's pockets." The constable shakes his head. "I'll be sorry to see that character go, thieving little bugger or no."

Sean frowns. "Constable, get my--" The constable grins, handing over the worn notebook before the sentence is finished, and Inspector Bean smiles wryly. "The Finns," he begins, licking the tip of his pencil absently before noting it down. "And the. . .?"

"The Connors, sir. I can take you right over there if you'd like."

"I would."  



	13. Chapter 13

It had always been less of an effort to feed from the smaller beings of the city; more for the ease of capturing them than the fear of discovery. Stray cats, dogs, rats. The odd bird if the catch on solid ground wasn't enough, crawling into eaves, steeples; warm pounding and fluttering under silky feathers and a ribcage so fragile he could crush it in his hand.

Then the winters started getting longer. When he emerged from the sewers after sunset he found that the streets were no longer his alone; scraps of brown rag littering the doorframes, trying to escape the white. He could feed enough every night that the heat flowed through his body in a pounding wave, and he could feel every nerve against the cracked brick, and the softness of the snow.

The money feels damp and sweaty between his fingertips and he hisses, the sound steaming in the crisp air, before closing his fist around it and shoving it into his pocket, leaping for a nearby lintel as other voices approach. His body feels heavy and hot, his nostrils full of the heady stench of copper. He's left no blood in the snow tonight, or footprints; only soft, broken bodies, yielding at last to the cold.

The moon casts his shadow on the shingle as if it's solid, flitting over to rooftops towards the dull pounding of sound that reverberates up through his fingertips and into the cavern of his chest. He feels like a beacon as he crouches, gargoyle-like and heated on the apex of the building, the broad stone steps spewing out into the snow below him.

*

Orlando has brown eyes and Dominic can't stop looking at them, is fascinated with the way they seem solid, glass kernels hard and closed, whole, gleaming.

"Music, it's fantastic." They shrink to crescents as Orlando grins and shrugs his shoulders. His accent is heavy on his light voice, different. "No labouring involved, and once you learn where your fingers are supposed to go - and your mouth, if you're that way inclined --" he winks and Dominic and laughs shortly "-- what more work do you have to do, except remember which way the little dots go on the page?"

Billy looks over a sheaf of hastily gathered pieces of manuscript at Dominic. Orlando continues, not noticing the exchanged glance; sitting awry his chair to face them, legs sprawled wide, instrument abandoned on the floor by his feet. The hall is full of the round-edged murmur of voices, faint in Dominic's ears after the bold ringing of music.

"Yes, and it's not as if you need the money to feed a family or anything," Billy says without batting an eyelid, and Orlando nods innocently.

"It's enough to live off."

The borrowed violin feels very brittle under Dominic's curled hands, the thin wooden back warm against the tops of his thighs. The pads of his fingers are pressed into the narrow curlicues.

Orlando is still talking. "--right, Dom?"

Dominic blinks slowly. His teeth hurt where they're pressing together, heavy. Orlando's still grinning, fingernails absently picking at the black paint flaking off the flimsy metal music stand. Billy's watching him too, expression closed and trumpet held close to his chest. He only holds Dominic's gaze for a moment before glancing away and looking over Orlando's head, blank eyes staring out onto the crowd.

"What?" Dominic says, but the hoarse, hardly-formed word is lost in the swift whisper of ordered sound as the conductor taps his baton and the band shifts into position around him. Orlando winks at him, and the music poises then begins.

*

"Geoffrey."

The constable halts in the act of pulling on his boots, having to reach out a hand for the wall hastily to stop himself overbalancing. He glances back over his shoulder. "It'll be alright, mam."

"You just be careful. The Carver's lost theirs last night as well, and he ain't much younger than you. Word from across town is there's a werewolf abroad."

"A werewolf, mam, really."

"Well something's doing this!" She pauses, hands flat against her belly and lips pressing together, then straightening the fluted fragility of an unlit oil lamp on the hall table for a moment with careful, measured movements. "Some _animal_."

Constable Shawcross finishes lacing his boot and rises, and his mother hears the dull _clunk, clunk_ of his boots on the bare floorboards before his hands close on her shoulders and she looks up into his face; jaw crooked and earnest. "The inspector knows what he's doing. I'll be back at dawn."

*

Commissioner Rhys-Davies takes another mouthful of his drink, savouring the smooth heat on the back of his tongue, then swallows, leaning back into the luxuriously padded chair.

"Nine, he told me today." He crosses his legs, stretches back a little, then uncrosses them again. "Seems to think it's some sort of homicide, but I'm more inclined to think plague, at this point."

"Oh yes?"

The commissioner nods, tipping his glass back again and leisurely letting his gaze linger on the slow movement below, sluggish in the thick, heady air. He nods.

"Marks on the throat, you see. And no evidence of foul play - no footsteps, blood, anything."

She smiles softly, long, white fingers absently caressing the carved, curling arm of her chair. "Indeed."  



	14. Chapter 14

The air is thick with fog and the night tastes electric to Dominic, the scent of lightning like blood on his tongue.

"Billy's not coming," Orlando says, and grins - spinning his instrument case in the air absently and catching it. "He said to go ahead." Dominic tries to get a glimpse back inside as the door swings open again, but can't make sense of the shifting of hunched backs and instrument cases, echoes of laughter cut off as the door closes.

The sound of their footsteps on the steps cracks the fine air sharply, and Orlando takes two at a time at first, and then pauses half way down to wait for Dominic to catch up.

Dominic's scarf is scratchy against the skin of his neck, he adjusts it uncomfortably, then looks up to meet Orlando's blank gaze. "What?"

"Nothing." Orlando's smile is different, the upward tilt of the side of his mouth and his head turning away to scan the empty street around them. He shoves his hands in his pockets.

The stairs flow from the hall into a small square, covered with mostly-clean snow at this time of the night - it must have fallen in between the time the night's revellers have left and now; weaving trails dark footprints mostly covered by a new layer of white, taking several different paths, leading into dark cavities of streets.

The snow crunches underfoot as Dominic steps off the last step, wary of the slippery stone, and Orlando steps in time with him.

"I'll walk you home," Orlando says, unnecessarily - he's been walking Dominic home every night for the several weeks (months? Days?) he's been playing with them; his own home further onward than Dominic's, past the marketplace-hub of the city and into the double-storied streets on the other side, a mirror image of these streets but for the slope. Dominic doesn't answer, adding to the fog with the steam of his breath. Orlando is unusually silent.

*

"You know how to find him."

Her hair is like polished gold in the bright light of the candles, a yellow aureola, glowing. The girl nods her head; more of a slight bow.

"Don't let him know you're watching him. And don't linger." Red lips curl up mirthlessly, leaving unspoken; _You know you don't need to._

*

"Keep up, constable!" Sean only has to say it once, and the gangly boy stumbles up to tag at his heels again; breath noisy and prickling at Sean's neck. The inspector winces at every crunch of dull friction their footsteps make against the snow, walking along the middle of the street, away from the shadows clinging to the corners, walls, alleyways.

They emerge from the dank air of the streets into the crisp openness of the square, walking through the emphatic shape of their breath as they approach the broad flight of stairs spilling out from the entrance to the hall.

"What now, sir?" Geoffrey puffs, rubbing his upper arms absently as he glances around the square, empty but for the snow.

"Most of the victims originate here," the inspector explains, digging a gloved hand into his breast pocket and retrieving the gleaming silver disc of a pocket watch. He flicks it open with one hand. "The music stops on midnight. Which was . . . Not half an hour ago." He looks up, slides the watch back into his pocket. "All we have to do now is pick a set of footsteps and follow them."

"But sir-- It's been more street kids than rich ladies being attacked of late. Wouldn't we have more of a chance keeping an eye on them?"

"And how do you propose that?"

Geoffrey frowns, gestures half-heartedly, opens his mouth and closes it again.

"Exactly. This, I'm afraid," --the inspector pulls out his notebook again, scribbles something -- "is our only option." He glances at the ground around them, then gestures to a clear set of footprints darkening the snow with their crisp shadow. "These ones should do."

*

He can smell it, feel it roiling in the air around him as he crouches high up where the fog is denser, where it clings to him like he doesn't exist, and the cold moves through him, wet and white.

They're closer, now; soft sickly murmur of uneven voice absent this time, and it makes him curl his lips back from his teeth, surging up in him, making him drop down onto the snow.

They don't see him, but they hear him -- at least one of them does, and he turns briefly and frowns. The other is still fumbling for his key with fingers that Elijah know are calloused and strong, and curls his own to claw into the wall close to the ground.

*

Dominic barely feels the touch at first until it shifts, creeps up under the scratchy warmth of his scarf; and when he turns around it's more in surprise than in encouragement, and his mouth is opening to speak as he's backed up against the damp stone wall, not to have Orlando's own mouth press against it, wet and open and almost steaming in the cold night.

He makes a small sound that he doesn't even hear and clutches one hand on Orlando's shoulder, the other trying to gain purchase on the crumbling mortar near his own thigh.

"Orlando," he tries to say through the insistent press of lips; but the world seems to suddenly be turning slower than it ought, because his brain scrabbles and grasps to make sense of the sudden weight pressing crushingly against him and then wrenched away. An eternity of white before he can look down, so slowly, to see the smears of darkness writhing on the snow, and it's more the sweat gleaming on Orlando's throat as his head is pulled back than his panicked cry that brings time back to its hectic pace, and makes Dominic yell, _"Stop!"_

He thinks the boy might be snarling, because the sound he can hear -- half-_feel_ \-- is not in time with the heaving of Orlando's chest, and Orlando gives out another strangled whimper as his head is wrenched back further by white fingers clenched in his hair.

_"No,"_ Dominic says, the word sounding like it's coming from somewhere else; the shuttered windows above, the closed door behind him. Eyes glitter at him like black ice over Orlando's shoulder, burnt jewels set in the pale face.

Orlando stumbles to his feet, runs; and Dominic is against the wall again, snow-cold iron in the shape of a key being pressed into his hand.  



	15. Chapter 15

"But sir, shouldn't we--"

_"Wait."_ Sean's hand flat on Geoffrey's chest, holding him back from moving forward, holding him still. The inspector not turning his head, not moving.

Constable Shawcross holds his breath, imagines he can hear the soft settling of snowflakes on the muffled ground; blurred edges of buildings. He stares so intently at the three dark figures that they almost seem white, surrounded by dry, dusty black; and the desperate cry makes his heart leap and pound in his ears so that he almost doesn't hear the quiet _"Stop."_

Three figures frozen amongst a whirlwind of silence, then infused with sound, another whimper and the crunch of snow as the one standing alone steps forward again.

Geoffrey can hear the man's panting breath, almost sobs, as he runs within only a few feet of their hiding spot, sliding around the corner and regaining his footing without losing much speed; he disappears into the icy streets of the night. Inspector Bean's hand is still pressing him back, and Geoffrey can feel it trembling just a little, held taut and still.

It looks like only one figure now, malformed and crudely shaped; then it breaks again into two and a door opens out of the black-faced wall, swallowing them up, closing without a sound.

*

She watches, lips bowed into a smile and the smell of fear rich in the air. The snow falls around her but she doesn't feel the cold, feels instead the heated pounding of heart's blood sink into the black stone around her, thrum up through her sandaled feet. Snowflakes like cloudy diamonds settle in hair the colour of dried blood and she watches the door close before walking away.

*

The fire's out, ashes like fine grey snow in the grate, and Dominic turns with the mantel behind him and faces the boy with his hands curled against his thighs.

The boy's eyes flicker blue and he steps forward from the door, slowly. His mouth is closed and Dominic doesn't think he's breathing. "Who are you?" Dominic whispers, and struggles for air in the closeness of the room; forcing his chest to fill against the sharp cold.

He refuses to let his eyes close, refuses to let himself give in to the bitter taste of heady warmth; stands still with teeth clenched as the boy moves closer, eyes huge and mouth closed, sombre.

His mouth doesn't open until Dominic's hand grasps his shoulder, jaw tight but lips parted to show a flash of white, eyes half-lidded as Dominic's hand slides against the grain of the velvet and onto the icy flesh of the boy's neck, collar open and limp cold against the back of Dominic's hand.

The mantel is harsh, at odds with the line of his spine and Dominic hisses a breath in through his teeth as white skin fills his vision, a flicker of dark lashes like spider legs, and he can't feel the moistness of breath on his cheek, ear; but feels the cruel press of fingers into his forearm -- "Elijah."

Dominic isn't sure if his arm is lifting of his own volition, with Elijah's fingers curled around it and sliding the sleeve back, bringing it to his mouth as his eyes flutter closed. Dominic's other hand sliding further up into dark, tousled hair and weaving his fingers into it as teeth sink in near his wrist, his bow arm, feeling wetness on the delicate skin, heat washing through him and Elijah pressing closer again.

"My name's Dominic," Dominic breathes, and Elijah lifts his head, mouth redhotwet and coppertasting.

"I know," Elijah whispers, and leans forward to lick his mouth.

*

"Walsh," Constable Shawcross announces to the dusty paper-scent air of the room. "Francesca Walsh."

"At that address?"

"Yes sir." Geoffrey marks the spot on the page with one broad, blunt finger fingertip, and looks up to where Inspector Bean paces, tapping his pencil against his thigh rapidly.

"Married?"

"Erm . . ." Geoffrey flicks a few pages, traces his forefinger over spidery lines of cursive. "Widowed, sir. No children."

Sean frowns, ceasing his pacing to grasp the black metal of an iron-ribbed window, resting his head on his upper arm and staring out intently. He rubs the pencil absently over his pursed lips.

"Maybe it's unrelated, sir. Maybe it was just a brawl we saw last night. There were no murders reported, were there?"

The lines on the inspector's forehead tighten. "A boarder, perhaps?" he continues, as if Geoffrey hadn't spoken; then pushes away from the window, spinning round to rap the pencil sharply against the chipped wood of the desk. Geoffrey starts. "Yes. Times are rough. A widower wouldn't let all that empty space go to waste." He grins.

Geoffrey half-smiles back, face dropping again as the inspector pulls out his notebook again and hastens out of the dusty room. Geoffrey lifts his hands to his face, the heels of his palms pressing heavily until they spill blood-black colour behind his eyelids and he slumps. His starched collar itches against his neck and his skin feels gritty and oily against the clean fabric, changed in a hurry in his tiny bedroom as his Mam fidgeted around the bare kitchen and the sun rose.

"Constable!"

"Yes sir," he mumbles, feeling like death warmed up as he pushes himself up from the chair with a sigh.  



	16. Chapter 16

Elijah doesn't need to dream because his memories are vivid enough; memories of pale skin and dirty blonde hair, wavy over a soft neck. Full lips opening for him, always open for him.

The emptiness of days he remembers more than the sunlight, washed-out white and nothing compared to the dense solidity of night snow. Clothes heavy like wet blood or light and smooth like cold skin moving over his own; high arched ceilings with leaves of yellow gold like autumn leaves fallen _up_; and waiting, waiting in the too-warm darkness behind his eyelids for night to come.  
He senses the anticipation of sunrise; prickling over his scalp and seizing his fingers into a rictus; he stretches out and rises, feeling the last remnants of heat slip away from his skin like morning mist, clinging to the brick-stone faces of the dead buildings. The snow in the alleyways is light, peppered with cat-prints, and as he slips around the house's grey shoulder he feels Dominic wake, quickened heartbeat.

*

Dominic wakes again in the armchair as the corners of the sun start to creep in his west-window; whatever heat he'd woken with at dawn dissipated into the gritty cold of the room long since. His mouth is thick with over-sleep and when he stretches out his legs - long ache in his thighs - the bow clatters to the ground, and it's a dizzying dip to retrieve it. His fingers smell like rosin and he struggles a little with the thin air at head-height when he rises, stumbles to the door with limbs creaking like they're recovering from rigor mortis.

"Mr Monaghan." He blinks blearily.

"Mrs Walsh." Fumbles blindly along the corner of the mantel closest to him, blessing her lack of a tendency to make conversation. "Here." He folds the crumpled notes into her work-hard hands.

She glances down, back up again, frowns. "But this is . . ."

"Consider it advance board." He smiles crookedly, lips as numb as teeth. She looks at him strangely, head tilting to peer up at him with eyes squinted, then turns on the small landing and descends down the stairs again, one at a time. Step. Step. Creak; Dominic watching her hunched, black-swathed shoulders until they disappear through a sturdy doorway at the opposite end of the hall.  
By the time Dominic leaves the house the sun has slipped down to waist-height of the bad-postured houses, glimpses of it burning behind his eyes as he walks, flashes of a brighter white in the dank-cold gaps between the buildings.

He's ravenous, and money found in his breast pocket means that he can afford meat, tough fibres rough against his tongue and insistent between his teeth, large portions torn away with a blunt knife and chewed slowly. The sound in the close room echoes into his skull dully, the rush and bubble of beer at the back of his mouth louder and clearer than roared laughter and the smack of wooden tankards against wooden bench tops.

The cold air is less of a rush and more of a clammy embracing as he steps outside again, and the bright white of the snow reflected almost blue in the twilight - sooty street lamps being lit in the street further ahead of him - makes the back of his eyes ache, then water hotly when he closes them. By the time he reaches the spewing flickers of orange flame his eyes have adjusted to it, and the warmth of the light is oily and sickening.

He passes small clusters of white-pink flesh and shiny-dark fabric, clouds of pealing laughter around them like night-insects, loud and over-eager and repetitive as he takes his hands out of his pockets to walk faster; overtake them and leap up the stairs three at a time as the moon breaks out over the corpse-grey rooves.

"Dominic." He can't read the expression on Ian's face, doesn't know what to make of it when the man hurries towards him over the soon-to-be-full dance floor and takes his elbow. Dominic's only been in the small office behind the stage once before, when he was first hired; and his nose prickles with the routine-stoked anticipation of the dust in the store room. He's still trying to make sense of Billy's expression; glimpsed for a brief moment as the man looked up at him when he was led brusquely past, then looked away.

Ian hands him an envelope. The paper is thick and creamy under his fingertips; rougher than skin and warmer. "What is it?" Dominic asks. His name has been carved into the front of it with broad nib and bleeding ink: _D. Monaghan_.

Ian sighs and leans forward over the cluttered desk, arms braced on the use-polished wood of the edge. "An invitation."

Dominic looks up from his scrutiny of the envelope, surprised. "To what?"

"To play at Blanchett Manor."

"Blanchett . . .?" Dominic's more incredulous than uncomprehending, and the rich paper in his hands suddenly feels more alien in memory of the gritty thinness of much-handled notes being peeled apart and handed over.

Ian nods, a slow bowing of his head, and Dominic can't read his expression again but he thinks it might be grief, or longing. Then Ian straightens abruptly, half-heartedly adjusting the papers on his desk to a different formation of chaos and sighing heavily. "It's a hard blow for us - losing two of you in the one night."

"Two of us?" Dominic asks in confusion, thinking, _Losing?_ and frowning.

"Master Bloom came in not half an hour ago - informing me of his immediate resignation." Ian sounds like he's waiting for Dominic to ask _'why?'_, but the question never comes and so he smooths his hands over his hips and walks around to Dominic's side of the desk. Rests one age-softened hand on Dominic's shoulder.

"This is a chance of a lifetime, Dominic," he says softly, and Dominic wants to withdraw, to pull back from the cloudy blue eyes peering out of the folds of skin around Ian's eyes, the earnest, drooping face too close. "For your career. . . Your music." He smooths his hands over Dominic's shoulders to clasp his upper arms; the movement not unlike the one carried out on his own body moments before. "But . . ." He pauses, his gaze flickering to Dominic's mouth, and to where his throat casts angular shadows between the folds of his scarf. Ian pulls away.

Dominic can hear the sound of the band tuning up through the wall behind Ian; snippets of extraneous sound like a sack emptied, upended with fragments of objects tumbling against each other and falling into empty air; string and drum and horn. "Do not give yourself up to it so completely that . . ." Ian's words meld with the sound, unrelated and unfitting but creating a strange, unpredictable melody that Dominic grasps futilely for at the edge of his hearing, and Ian sighs again, exasperated. "She is beautiful, and treacherous." He studies Dominic's face closely. "Do not fall so far that you are beyond chance of salvation."

*

It doesn't take Elijah very long to find him; he can feel the thrum of notes through the curl of his fingers and the ghost-ache in his forearms. Smell the warm coppersaltheat of blood and the dark scent behind his jaw.

He moves soundlessly through the moonlight-gilded shapes of broken wings and square tongue-shapes thrusting up from the cold, black earth; and the fog swirls around his feet, eddies of disquiet.

"What are you doing here?" He can feel the stutter and pound of Dominic's heart, hears the quick intake of breath. Dominic turns, frowns a little; his face soft and mobile in the moonlight, not serene like the marble visages gazing mournfully down at him from all sides.

Dominic gestures around him, the movement short and stilted before he curls his arms around his own waist. "Looking for you."

Elijah doesn't smile but Dominic almost thinks he recognises the shift of expression around his mouth, his brow, minute; and Elijah moves, prowls around Dominic, steps slow and smooth and moving closer. "What made you think I'd be here?"

"Um," Dominic's shoulder twitches a little; suggestive of another explanatory gesture but thwarted by his arms trapped around each other. "You know. Graveyard. It's where the, uh . . ."

Elijah does smile then, a curling of his lips that shows his teeth but not mirthless. "I'm not dead," he murmurs, stepping closer to Dominic's back, curving his hand under the hair at the back of Dominic's neck. The scarf hangs loose over Dominic's shoulders, down his chest. Dominic shivers.

"But you're not --"

"Alive." Elijah presses close enough to feel the pounding of Dominic's heart through the tenseness of his back; echoing through Elijah's own body like a drum. "But I can die."

Dominic doesn't turn, but he loosens his arms, drops them to his sides, hands curling against the sides of his thighs, feeling the metal heaviness of coins in his pockets through the rough fabric. "How?" he breathes as Elijah licks a place where Dominic's skin is sensitive, behind his ear and below his skull. He waits for the hot-sudden burning flush of a bite, but it doesn't come; Elijah's mouth moving, cold and slick, down a tendon at the back of his neck and to his shoulder. Elijah's arm curls around, slides beneath Dominic's jacket, his shirt; icy against his flinching skin.

"A stake," Elijah murmurs, lips moving against Dominic's shoulder and dizzying. "Something wooden." He presses his fingers against the pounding in Dom's chest. "Through my heart."

Dominic hisses as the mouth is withdrawn, and opens his eyes as Elijah moves soundlessly, sliding another hand like white snow beneath the layers of Dominic's clothing, mirroring the other, sliding down Dominic's back as the monuments around him deafen them with their silence and their silver-sheen, sweating with cold foggy condensation and gleaming painfully as Elijah moves lower still.

He takes blood from high on the inside of Dominic's thigh, and carved stonework digs sharply into Dominic's palm, white white smooth white blank white faces watching him and shifting up and behind Dominic's eyes until he's falling back into the hot thick hot darkness behind his eyelids, and making noises that look like the pitching and roiling of fog around Elijah's knees.  
"Sunlight," Elijah breathes, hot into his ear as they curl around the base of a particularly large monument, Elijah's body like malleable heat, curving around Dominic and tasting like blood.

"Crucifixes?" Dominic asks, watching with eyes half-lidded as Elijah grazes teeth over the calluses on Dominic's fingertips. Elijah laughs, the sound short and low, bow pressed a little too hard on too-taut strings, and his eyes look grey when he turns his face up. Dominic follows his gaze after a long moment to see crosses dividing the uneven texture of the low, thick-clouded sky; overlapping and looming in over where they rest on the cold stone.

"No," Elijah says at length, still looking up and around them. Dom feels sluggishly warm, the cold air on his skin like a slow sluice of silk moving over his face and neck. Elijah's expression changes a little, jaw tightening and brows shifting lower only slightly. "We've been around too long for that."

His eyes are dark now, black, and his hands are almost cruel on Dominic's jaw, titling his head back a little roughly and lowering his head until Dominic can't see him, only feel the sharp painstingburn of teeth on his throat, then the harsh _suck_ that makes the grey tumult of sky swoop lower and the blackened silhouettes of statues twist away.  



	17. Chapter 17

Dominic is woken by bells, clamouring like nervous blood in his ears, the sounds low and dull and tumbling over each other in their eagerness to reach him. His back aches, and there are places on his body that feel raw, as if the skin has been chafed away by night.

He sits up awkwardly, stone gritty under his numb palm, curling his fingers into loose fists as he leans back against the grimy marble of the monument, rubbing knuckles against each other in an attempt to regain feeling.

The morning sunlight is dim, washed out, the statues grey now rather than white; and by the time he's able to drag his feet towards him, curling his arms loosely about his knees, he can see a slow progression of subdued colour passing between the slits of space between the headstones. He watches until a prickling, reluctant heat makes itself known in his fingers and toes, then there's a low groan and _slam_ as the church doors close again, and he rises.  
It hasn't snowed overnight, so the ground is grey and obscene brown and slushy beneath his stumbling feet, smooth-edged shards of impure ice crunching wetly. Brown scraps of rag tatter past him like autumn leaves, voices too loud and clear in ears that should be numb from some kind of ethereal music.

It's cold.  
Mrs Walsh hears the heavy snap of his key turning in the lock and she's in the hall when he closes the door behind him.

"Police were here," she says, matter-of-factly, and Dominic watches her meticulously dry her hands with an off-white cloth. The front of her black dress is spattered with flour like white blood. "Half an hour ago. Wanting to know if I had a boarder."

"What did you tell them?" His throat hurts, voice scraping at it like an un-waxed bow.

"That it was my business where my finances came from." She sniffed dismissively. "They'll be back, though. Eventually. Only a couple of them today, some lad looking like he still had a few years before he grew into his uniform, let alone his ears; and some detective fellow. Called himself 'Inspector Bean', though why anyone would give him _any_ information with a name like that is beyond me." She turns around again, walking back to her own door, black skirts swinging.

He's too tired to avoid the creaking stairs, but when he drops heavily down onto his bed - grey and damp and gritty in the cool, wet air of the tiny room - he feels the protesting snap of thick paper in his breast pocket.

The envelope feels warm, and he would think it was from being pressed so close to his chest all night except that his hands are shiver-shuddering with cold. The paper is thick, folds heavy, and it slides out of the stiffly-gaping envelope with a sound like dense breath.

The ink looks as if it's oozed out of the paper like blood, cut with the sharp nib he can see in the fine and broad strokes of letters, sharp and curving. Elegant, and he can barely read what it says because his head is heavy and vision spinning when he blinks, but he grips the cold sheets by his hip on the edge of the bed and reads _Tonight_.

*

Dominic's never been to Blanchett Manor before, but he's heard enough about it to have a picture of it in his head; rich tapestries and bright colour, expansive, elaborate architecture, marble stairways spilling out like bridal skirts, light and warmth and music.

It's nothing like he's imagined.

Manor in name more than anything else; a mockery of a countryside property, really, but manor-like enough in the claustrophobic sweaty stone of the city. Arched gates, wrought iron, looming up and over him in the black sky before he finds a smaller gate amongst the choking, leathery leaves of ivy. There are two oily, red torches undulating on either side of the doorway, and as he walks towards them leaves crunch and squelch underfoot rather than snow; trees closing in over above him, branches unseen but presence felt in the dull groaning whispers that seem to follow him.

His new shirt - white, pristine and rough against his skin - itches, and he shifts uncomfortably, tugging at the collar of his jacket and rubbing the toe of his boot on the back of his calf. The door panels are cluttered with carvings, figures writhing and intertwined with leaves and fire, angles of the bodies sharp like flames. The knocker is heavy, and brass, and doesn't echo so much as reverberate within the wood itself, thick and dense.

He doesn't know if he's early or not; he thinks he's on time but he's not really sure what that is - dark enough for long enough that it feels as if it's always been that dark or it always will be that dark - but when the door swings open slowly and soundlessly, he thinks he might be late.

He notices first the colour; not so much spilling out as it is roiling within the manor, drawing the light of the dully flickering torches into it. There's sound, maybe music, but it sounds distant and muffled like blood pounding through his veins when he rests his head on the unresisting arm of his armchair; and low and heavy, bass sliding low along the ground like vaporous heat, humid, beneath the red duskiness of smoke that he can't quite see.

There's a girl standing in the doorway, and Dominic wonders how he didn't see her at first, and then wonders if maybe he did?, because her hair is dark but really, it's red; dense dead rust like dried blood and her skin is fair and eyes pale pale blue and ringed with black and ringed with black outside of her eyes, as well; licks of fine blackness.

He's not sure if it's much warmer inside but a slow, uncomfortable heat seems to have prickled up his limbs, crawling and gnawing through his skin and making him sweat and the red flush into black momentarily and the girl smiles without opening her mouth and steps slightly to the side in invitation. "I'm Mary-Elizabeth."  
He feels almost like he's walking underwater but for the restless smoky heat at the back of his throat. Everything seems to have slowed down, even his vision taking noticeable moments to catch up with the sluggish motion of his head, turning to look around him. The air itself almost seems to glow red, heated orange and sullen ochre and he catches glimpses of slow, curving movement; fading back into imperceptible layers of heat-haze when he turns to look.

They might be walking through a hall but Dominic can't seem to tell where the walls are on either side; sometimes they seem closer, made apparent by the dusky folds of a velvet drape or the heady curves of a statue; other times they seem to give and fall back like pliant darkness. The girl walks just ahead of him and he feels big and ungainly, like a clay doll with limbs misshapen and undefined, dumb.

Finally the hall opens out before them and he steps down.  



	18. Chapter 18

It's her that he sees first, though he has to struggle through a rush of sense-memory later to discern it. Stepping down the few, shallow steps brings on a sudden wave of sensation, and it's as if he can't focus on anything - a rush of colour, shape, movement, sound, smell. He's aware of the floor, a square free of chair or lounge, space carpeted rich or perhaps a riot of rugs cast upon it, dense and dark spilt colour; steps bordering it on four sides, one set of which he's just descended from and in the recesses above them movement - flashes of bare skin, golden in the light (and where was the light coming from?) or orange, copperbronze and sleek, not white and plump like the dancehall's pasty beauty; and sound coming from another - there, that was familiar, the ivory teeth of a piano grinning from somewhere as a black shape moves across his line of vision, and the curve of a cello-hip, its vibrant polished surface dulled by the thick air; and sound, he can hear, _something_ beyond a soft murmur of unintelligible voices, _something_ like the low bass hum when he'd stepped into the house but stronger now, throbbing in his ears and he's struggling to hear it, struggling to grasp it, struggling against it, and her--

Opposite him, and above him, now - and he has to squint in the redheatdarkness, squint against the soundmovesmell clamouring in like heavy, swaddling sensation on either side to see her - golden and golden and _there_, the light of her not-shining, and it seems that all the movement, all the colour and taste and smell and sound of the room and beyond-room are drawn into her.

She smiles. "Mr Monaghan," she says softly, And Dominic doesn't know how he can hear her when even the harsh wheezing of his breath is muted to his ears. "Our new violinist." He can't tell what colour her eyes are, they seem to sink into a shadow too deep for the depths cast by her brow; smooth, fair, _golden_; and he can't look for long.

"I don't have a . . ." He struggles, voice aching hard to pierce through the thickness packed down low in his throat, the gleaming too-bright windows of the pawn shop far away.

"There is a violin here for you," she says, and he follows the slow, almost languid movement of her arm - breathlessly sleeveless, bare, golden skin from shoulder to wrist and fine, fine boned hands and long elegant fingers, gleaming rings - One fat and gold, making the skin seem almost white; and another with silver-pale metal, shaped like a star but spider-webbed over a stone, or more of a _crystal_, an inverted diamond, black and full. He stumbles in the direction of the gesture, up more shallow stairs to accept a violin with shaking hands from a black-sleeved figure; feeling light and heavy and cold and sweating in the wake of her gaze and desperate, desperate to feel it upon him again.

*

Elijah waits. He doesn't know where the bow is but he turns over the table and the bed before finding it underneath the armchair; collapsed seat now joined by crushed arm, snapped back. The ashes in the fireplace are cold, fine fine grey snow, but he avoids it nonetheless, carefully placing the bow on the mantel. His fingers tangle with the slack horsehair and he pulls away hurriedly.

A streak of ice forges up the small window pane and Elijah elaborates it, tracing jagged patterns, a intricate madness formed by delicate lines of ice following his fingertips over the glass, and they form an impossible jigsaw when the glass breaks around his fist, falls in shards like cold lightening to the snow below. He licks at his knuckles and doesn't taste anything; snarls at skin whiter than the snow. He leaves before dawn.

*

Constable Shawcross feels the crunch of glass underfoot, sensation scraping ragged fingernails up the back of his shin bone. He frowns, looks up; sees the damp flutter of stained curtain struggling out of the gaping window. After a moment he walks on, but the pitted metal number above the doorway goes not unnoted; and the building's colour and shape is much the same in daylight as it was when he first saw it at dead night.

The police headquarters always smells like metal; like warm, wet iron on the sides of his tongue and the back of his nostrils, and the steps are always gritty and dark grey, not slippery so much as sweaty in the cold air. The Inspector's office always smells like paper, and stale coffee, and dust sifting somewhere behind it and Geoffrey hears voices as he walks up the empty hall, slowing his steps and lightening them, approaching the open doorway silently.

". . . led me to believe you might be able to help me, Inspector." The voice is heavily accented, an edge of impatient command beneath a polite veneer. "My name is Murnau. Friedrich Murnau. I am a film maker." There's a brief silence. "Moving pictures?"

Geoffrey can hear the familiar almost-squeal-creak of the Inspector's chair, pictures him leaning back, hands placid in his lap, with an expression not of disinterest but more of . . . composed blankness.

The foreigner clears his throat uncomfortably. Geoffrey holds his fingertips poised near the doorframe, tilting his head closer to the wall next to the open door, forcing his breath to be slow and silent. "I was told you had been investigating some . . . Unnatural phenomena in the city recently."

Inspector Bean allows the silence to drift within close range of discomfort. "I've been investigating homicides, Mr. Murnau - details of which I'm not at liberty to discuss with the general populace."

"Oh, but I'm not the general populace, Inspector Bean, I am a --"

"_Film maker_, I know." From long months working with him, Constable Shawcross knows when the Inspector is laughing, despite his neutral demeanour.

There's an uneasy silence. Geoffrey can recognise the sounds of fidgeting in the seat on the far side of the desk; he's made them himself countless times.

"How many bodies have their been so far? Ten? Twenty? More?" The foreign voice has rediscovered its superiority, its derisive assuredness. "Plague proportions? Plague _symptoms_?"

"Constable Shawcross," Bean calls after a moment, and Geoffrey stands up straight again and walks into the room.

"Sir?"

"Wounds on the throat or neck? _Bite_ marks?" The foreigner - dull yet intense-featured with hair flopping over a receding hairline mimicking drooping lines around his mouth - ignoring Geoffrey's presence at his back and continuing now with a note of desperation. "Inspector, I simply _must_ know--"

"Constable, please escort Mr Murnau to the door," Bean said amiably, voice not changing, not rising in pitch but still riding over Murnau's now openly desperate: "You don't know how long I've been _looking_\--" And Geoffrey takes the foreigner's arm before the man shrugs him off with something akin to disgust and shuts his mouth, snatching his coat from the back of the chair before scowling and quitting the room, sweeping through the gaping doorway with the curled hunch of his angered shoulders.

"Should I--?" Constable Shawcross leaves the question unfinished as the Inspector makes a dismissive gesture, so Geoffrey closes the door and lowers himself to the recently-vacated chair instead. The Inspector is making notes again, in the little black-covered notebook that seems never worn or ragged with writing, always crisp and clean and tight.

It's still early morning - Geoffrey's still not quite used to getting up when the city glows with the light of the still-absent sun like a death-rattle - but he feels restless; his body's used to leaving his warm bed and worn sheets for the crisp, burning ice of night-air in his lungs and the squeaking crunch of untouched snow under his boots. Untouched, and surrounding a spill of colour and not-colour; bright fabric and lifeless flesh. "Do you think he's gone, sir?"

"Do I think who's gone, Constable?" Bean asks, his tone absent as he scribbles in the notebook. Geoffrey fidgets.

"The killer, sir. . . It's been . . . Well, a few days since the last body."

"No," Inspector says at length, snapping the notebook shut at last and leaning forward again. "I don't think he has."

Geoffrey tells him about the glass.  



	19. Chapter 19

Dominic's key doesn't fit in the lock. The air outside is sharp and painful in his throat and he's not sure how much longer he can breathe it so he pounds on the door urgently, forehead lolling involuntarily against it as the cold tremors down through his belly and into his legs.

Mrs Walsh frowns at him, a brief deepening of the furrows in her brow, then gestures wordlessly down the hall toward her own door, shutting the front door and sliding the bolt home before bustling along behind him.

"I wasn't sure that you were coming back," she says matter-of-factly, pressing a mug of something hot into his (cold-)shaking hands, and he frowns, lifting it to his mouth and cringing a little as the steam burns up into his nose and his throat. He coughs. "The police came again, about your broken window - that isn't part of your board, I'll have you know, you'll have to deal with it yourself - and so I had to let them in." She turns from where she's restlessly shifting things about on the work-polished bench, leans her back against it instead, shoulders slumping, smearing white flour on her face with her hand. "We weren't sure what had happened, what with your room the way it was." She seems Dominic's look of incomprehension, elaborates. "It's been three days since you left. I changed the locks in case . . ." she gestures half-heartedly. "In case whatever -- _whoever_ you came across came across your key." She turns again, presses her fist hard into the misshapen ball of dough slowly sagging on the bench.

*

His room is cold, but by now the icy dampness of the air is more familiar, refreshing to his tea-scalded mouth and throat. The black stove squats crudely against one wall, but low as it is, it seems to be them only thing left standing in the room besides Dominic himself. The table and chairs are maimed, broken into familiar pieces - he'd bought ones similar enough from cheeks-sunken heavy-lidded peering people on the street, to burn and leave burning while he walked to the dance hall with his breath eager in the night air. The armchair looks as if it might have tried to escape to be halted in its steps, tripped with base thrust in the air, balanced unevenly on snapped back, crushed arms. It's dusty underneath, and the fabric is brighter than the worn colours on the arms and seat.

The bed is splayed out and the sheets are dirty with footprints - not Elijah's, he never leaves any - but heavy booted, damp. Dominic hauls it back to rights again, but something's broken somewhere in it because it leans and jerks nervously when he tries to put any weight on it.

All the bricks on the hearth are worn and dusty, but he tears two fingernails scratching one of them up anyway, choking on dust and scraping his knuckles and the soft, fibrous-worn paper of the envelope soaks up drops of scarlet and a hissed curse as the edge of a crisp note slices into the pad of his forefinger.

The redness makes his head spin, makes the back of his neck feel low and heavy and he has to rest back on his heels with his chin pressed to his chest, flushing with heat and the memory of colour and sound and _music_, gold light and gold and leaves crunching underfoot and wet against the back of his skull and pale pale sunlight through a hysterical latticework of branches and leaves; then heated darkness he was _suffocating_ on.

_He can't find the bow._ The surface of the mantel is empty, sweating coldly under his shaking fingers as he grasps at it to heave himself upright again, and - his heart lurches, disappears, pounds back into existence - it's not in the scattered ruin of the table's wooden remains, or the chair's.

_Elijah_. No, not Elijah, he wouldn't have taken it. _Elijah, Elijah_, Dominic wants the bow, like a desperate, high-pitched itch and _no, Elijah wouldn't take it_ because it's not what Elijah wants, and Dominic's mind conjures up Elijah's mouth, blood-red, and the polished dark-auburn wood of the stick between his lips, white horsehair and white, pointed teeth and _No_.  
"Yes," Mrs Walsh says as Dominic props himself up in her doorway, shaking. "They did take something with them, as a matter of fact." She rubs her hands over the front of her black apron. "I didn't get a look at it. 'Evidence' I suppose they'd call it."

*

The police headquarters reeks. Of stale, sweating metal and of dust and old, damp paper and uniform starch. Dominic sits in a tiny room with grime around the skirting board, obnoxious metal-and-wood chair pinching at the backs of his thighs. His back hurts, and his hands are uneasy.

"Mr Monaghan." The man is tall, dirty blonde and not looking at Dominic as he walks into the room, uniform a pristine navy and notebook held loosely in his left hand. His features are stubborn, accent heavily stamping his otherwise placid voice, rough-edged like an unsanded plane of wood. "We've caught you at last, I see." The side of his mouth curls up, but Dominic can't read any humour in the lines of his face. "In a manner of speaking."

A boy is fidgeting in the doorway - standing half in and half out - but when Dominic glances over in his direction he steps in and straightens his uniform self-consciously. Not a boy, then, and Dominic almost winces in sympathy of the oversized ears, the blunt nose and nervously misaligned jaw. Almost, but -- "My bow. You took it." The officer doesn't answer, doesn't sit. Dominic frowns. He _wants_ \-- "Why?"

The man looks up at last, Dominic doesn't break eye contact until he's forced to as the man paces around to stand behind him. "The only thing left untouched in a room in which everything else was destroyed?"

"You had no right to take it." He feels his voice crawl from his throat, clawed and trailing chains and files along the bare-wood floor, scraping, echoing.

"I had every right. Rather suspicious, don't you think? Especially in a homicide case. And no sign of the violin? Or is it 'cello? Bass?" He moves again, from behind Dominic towards the room's small window, and Dominic crushes the thought of _homicide?_ The man runs a fingertip absently along the window ledge. "I used to play the horn, myself." He turns, Dominic grits his teeth and doesn't break the gaze. "But I never kept the mouthpiece after my father had to sell it to support us." His mouth moves again, Dominic almost thinks it's a smirk, but changes his mind. From the corner of his eye he can see the young constable shift nervously at his post by the - now closed - door.

"Then again," the officer continues, eyes sliding away from Dominic again as he steps closer again. "I wouldn't have had to pawn it at all if I could have got the money through . . . other mediums."

There's a loud knocking on the door and Dominic's hands clench on his knees, knuckle bones wound so tight he imagines he can hear the hot metal whine-squeak of tension in them. The constable jumps, steps out of the room hastily at a glance from the officer, who pads around to stand behind Dominic's chair again as soft voices rise outside, muffled through the gritty stone. Well, one is soft, and it curls amiably up under the gap beneath the door while another trumpets out, loud and low and smacking against surfaces, flat sound. The door opens.

"Inspector Bean." The man is tall, black trimmed-bearded, paunch thrust before him. He self-assuredly pats at his breast pocket before pulling out a box of matches and licking his lips. Dominic struggles with something whispering on the edges of his memory, like dream-wisps blown away upon waking.

"Commissioner." The officer's - Inspector Bean's - body is taut, tense, fists clenched around the black notebook. Dominic can't seem to get enough air, but he presses his lips closer together. The Commissioner strikes a match absently on the brick wall opposite Dominic, mouth closing about the stem of a rather ornate pipe. The Commissioner glances at Dominic, and takes the pipe out of his mouth. His eyes narrow.

"On what grounds are you interrogating this man?" he asks, gaze not leaving Dominic's face, and Dominic feels the shift, senses it as the Inspector moves restlessly, switching the notebook to his right hand.

"As part of the homicide investigation, sir, I hardly think this is the time to be--"

"Release him." The Commissioner places the stem of the pipe back in his mouth, pearl stained yellow, and draws on it heavily.

"But sir--" The constable has stopped his nervous fidgeting by the doorway and seems to be stunned motionless instead, unable to tear his gaze away from the workings of the Inspector's barely-controlled features. Dominic's fingers gradually loosen.

"My bow . . ." Dominic scrapes and the Commissioner gestures briefly with his shoulder as he slips the box of matches back into his pocket.

"And return his . . . bow. And I'll thank you not to confiscate property without my explicit permission in future, Inspector."

The Inspector nods tightly. Dominic leaves.  



	20. Chapter 20

The closest he's come to pain throughout the ages is a gnawing hunger, and its teeth are sharp now, pulling and pinching at him as heartbeats tumble like falling stones in his ears, clamouring eagerly through the sponge-like stone walls rising up and around him.

The snow's too white and Dominic is a black, struggling mass against it, rough-edged and filling the air around him with a nervous opacity that fades away each time he takes a new breath.

He's not meant to walk this way. He's heading in the wrong direction, the opposite direction to the dance hall, and Elijah wouldn't even be waiting here except for the fact that he's been waiting in the _right_ direction for the past three nights.

Dominic's heartbeat pounds forward with a frantic rhythm that Elijah savours as he spins Dominic around, presses him against the wall just inside the alley, feeling the grind of Dominic's shoulder blades against the harsh stone through his grip on Dominic's lapels. Dominic's mouth is hot with surprise, a scalding flood of it into Elijah's mouth as he bites down on Dominic's tongue, presses his body closer as if trying to press himself into Dominic, crawl inside his mouth, immerse himself in the thick saltiness of living copper and let the notes be absorbed through his skin, pitch into pores and make his bones thrum with the same rhythm that --

Dominic pushes him away and there's blood on his chin, blood on Dominic's chin that looks black in the dim light though Elijah can see where it pools and fills the tiny craters and crevasses in Dominic's skin, sticking around short stubbles of hair and it's like an earthquake when Dominic's mouth moves and the lines around it shift. Flooding into him, too, coating his throat and moving already into his own veins and the heat of it almost hurts but his mouth is dry so he tries to push forward again but Dominic pushes him back and he can crush Dominic, with this new strength, but Dominic is saying _"I don't want your money any more,"_ he's hissing it, and speckles of red fall like embers to burn holes in the purity of the snow, white, and Elijah can see every flake of it and a choking grief rises in him as he sees the heat of the blood melt through them, mourning each star of unique lacework destroyed.

Elijah brings his hand up to his own mouth, feels the heat coming out of it onto the writhing skin on the back of his hand, and he licks the smears away, little after shocks of sensation on his tongue, white again.

Dominic's speaking again but the sound parts in the air before it gets to Elijah, parts and spreads around him and makes the tiny particles of clinging frost on the walls tremble, parts around him and closes around him, a fine layer of silence as sound folds in and in on itself just within his skin, rhythm and pitch and timbre and tempo, folding in and crashing in wave upon wave, and the mortar between the bricks flutters and fidgets in the silence.

Dominic's hand, then, harsh on his throat, every hook and burr in the calloused fingertips grating minutely, his skin crawling away or rushing towards it, he can't tell which, but the heat's activated by its originator's touch, and Elijah's eyes roll back, his head lolling and he can see the stars, shifting flickering singing notes piercing the blackness down to him in fine columns.

Then Dominic's gone and he's alone again, but he's not alone because he can hear the footsteps of approach thick crunching in the snow and the snow is falling now and it melts as it touches him, tiny blossoming spots of ice and his mouth is steaming he can see it in the air in front of him he can see the air in front of him and he's alone because there's no heartbeat, Dominic's stubborn pounding faded away but there's crunching and it's coming closer.

He's spun, shoved against the wall that still groans with the memory of Dominic's touch, but it's not Dominic this time and he's confused and his feet aren't touching the ground and there's no heartbeat, no rhythm of fear or excitement only flames burning through him and his eyes roll again and _Oh--_

His veins are full of flame, liquid fire and strength and he can't see the face because the moon has risen behind it, and it's a mass of blackness but he feels the fingers, the curled knuckle bones cold pressing against his skin and his body tenses into a rictus and he's writhing, kicking hissing spitting clawing teeth bared snarling struggling and only serving to grind himself into the cold brick further like a millstone, so he goes soft again, soft and small and limp and helpless and his tears are so hot and wet and thick that he can't help curling his tongue to catch them as they spill over the corner of his lip.

There's a laugh, low and short and mirthless and the blurred blackness has sharp edges as it leans closer and _"Elijah,"_ a low, gravely voice licks at the deceptive tears, self-assured and making Elijah's body curl up then kick out again in a primal frustration. And Elijah spits then regrets it as the face pulls back and the rusty moonlight shows it to be red-tinged still. "Haven't you come a long way since last we met?"

Elijah's crouching, then, wound tight in the snow with a growl at the back of his throat and ready to spring at the figure but it steps back, into the shadow cast by the moon now on the opposite side of alleyway. "Apparently not." A low laugh again, that self assured, mocking sound coiling up Elijah's spine and curling it, scraping backwards against the grey stone. "And look where you are now."

Elijah does spring, then, and finds himself pressed back into the snow coldwet with his back and neck stretched by the forearm pressing up under his chin, pressing _back_ and a weight like heavy blood lead over his body, knee low on his belly. And the strength still flowing through him is enough to scrape gouges in the arm over his throat, gouges that open the flesh but don't bleed, and his shriek ricochets around the small space and he feels it echoed in panicked awakenings within the stone caskets before his wrist is pinned by his head and he stills. "Is this how it was with him? Did he come upon you in dark places? Did you _wait for him?_" The last is a hissing whisper, and Elijah's eyes twist up and back until he can see the uneven blocks of his brows stamped on the steeples of nearby houses, peripheral to the oppressive star-stung black. He kicks again, a convulsive bucking that screams through his body but he's still pinned.

"How did you do it, in the end?" Elijah wants Dominic, wants him _now_, wants Dominic's strengthsoundblood to fill his veins like mercury and let him _crush_\-- "You must have been waiting for him. With a stake? Or did you lure him into staying until dawn?" The knee presses down harder and Elijah snarls. The voice pauses, thoughtfully, "But no -- you couldn't have done that. It would have been too late by then."

He goes still again, soft but tense and waiting. _"Viggo,"_ he whimpers, pleadingly, and the face above him splits into a wolfish grin.

"That's how, is it? Of course. How could he resist?" But the weight on Elijah doesn't relent. Grinds closer. "You were always a spoilt child, Elijah. I'm surprised you've still maintained your grasp on civilised speech. Do you even remember his name?"

"Macauly," Elijah hisses through his teeth, involuntary as Viggo presses his arm up against his chin harsher and the back of his skull grinds through melted snow into gritty cobblestone, and Viggo grins again, sharp white.

"That's it." Elijah moans, burning ice strength against the skin of his throat, feeling the heat in his veins curdle, bitter discordant. "One of the Blanchett brood."

"What do you want from me, Viggo?" it's less of a snarl this time and he can feel Viggo's skin warming against his. Or maybe his is cooling.

"What do you want from _him_?" Elijah can make out his eyes, dull grey as the moon curls further about its malformed circuit. "Macauly, I could understand. A Blanchett baby, though a soft one, a sickling. I think Cate was actually pleased when you took care of him."

"He took care of me first," spat out, bitter like he hasn't tasted for as far back as his memory goes, petulant.

"At your bidding," Viggo hisses, obscene against the side of Elijah's face and Elijah squirms involuntarily. "Is that what this is?" and Elijah feels the crumbling pull of dried blood around his mouth. "An escape for you? _For him?_"

Elijah manages to throw him off this time, icy strength and clawing for Viggo's eyes until his body's uncurled again and face pressed hard into stained snow. "What do you want," he grates out again, snow in his mouth, crisp and hard.

"A warning," Viggo hisses out again, close to Elijah's ear and crushing against his back. "If not for you then for your new toy." The moon dips behind an arched roof, silvery halo stained with wisps of low cloud. "She has you in her sights again. She won't let you go so easily this time." The weight disappears, Elijah is alone.  



	21. Chapter 21

Her court isn't as large as it used to be, nor as extravagant though it's still maintained it's dense allure; a fabric smaller but more tightly woven than the loose, sweeping stitch of ages past.

Their catch is smaller, blood not as pure as it has been in the past; she's had to move underground, out of sight, a furled, craved menace lingering and lurking at the edge of sight, the taste on the side of one's tongue. Petty nobles blaming weakness and headaches on opium hangovers or brandy; waking and remembering little but the curve of heated flesh, music and colour and warmth so distant from the mute, harsh snow; and _wanting_ . . .

The commissioner sits by her side, at her feet, lower on the pedestal-steps, but she doesn't look at him. She can feel his heartbeat, fat and lazy, and it beats in an odd, sinuous rhythm with the few others in the room; it's only early and they're still looking down their noses at the shifting colours of the room, the music yet to start up, their backs still turned to the yielding darkness in the recesses beyond where they stand. Cool limbs waiting to draw them in and wrap around them, draw them out. Heat.

Her violinist is still wide-eyed but jaw-clenched this time, she can smell the copper energy of blood on him, see veins upraised and coiled around fine tendons on the inside of his wrist when he steps up, reaches up to take the violin and merges with the swirling shadows there. _Her_ violinist, something new to stretch out and bow, strings to pull taut, something to _play_.

Not that she would have picked him out herself. Elijah had always been more plebeian in his choices, if he made any choices at all, like an animal sniffing after thick blood even if it had crude features. More carnal than the delicacies her court had to offer; it had entertained her to toy with him for a while, amuse herself with the potential of taming him before he'd writhed out of her grip.

Animalistic, and becoming more so, feral; no doubt likely to meet his end from gorging and sleeping with fat belly until the sun puts him truly to sleep.

Or so she'd thought.

Her court isn't as large as it used to be; its catch meagre and not as purebred as it once was. The years stretch before her and behind her; and eternity in the blink of an eye and she needs something to amuse her, the fill the flickering hours lest they end up all tasting like blood, stained red, and nothing more. She raises her hand and the music starts.

*

Dominic wakes up with the taste of dried blood under his tongue, old and bitter, and he pushes himself up with elbows shaking to spit into the hearth. It's dark in the room but he can't remember the last time his eyes saw sunlight so it's not so bad. He can see the mournful shape of the overturned armchair, jagged splinters of the table legs jerking up in the low-slung air. The side of his face hurts from being pressed against the prickle-weave of the burgundy rug, and his jaw is loose and he's not quite sure how he got here but it's time to leave again soon.

It feels strange not having a key in his pocket; not having something heavy to weigh it down, not having something to turn over and over cold warming and smelling like ironmetal on his fingers afterward. He's not paying attention as he walks, fast, his memories streaming like a trail of smoke behind him and he wants to stop to let them catch up, cluster around him so he can breathe them in again and savour them, but they dissolve away as soon as he tries to grasp them so he walks faster.

Some of the street lights have guttered out already but he thinks he prefers the cold white to the flicker-stained oily orange red. Closer to Blanchett Manor there are none, anyway, though there ought to be because there's a carriage pulling away; he can see it lurch-crawling away hunch backed up ahead but by the time he gets to the gate himself there's no sign of any other.

"Dominic." a whisper whimper entreaty curled round the wrought iron bars of the gate he's just closed behind him and he turns and Elijah's there, black and white with the snow behind him and the bars dissecting his face thickly. "Open the gate."

Dominic is silent, jaw clenched, watching Elijah as his face softens, lashes lower, looks up at him with eyes huge and reflecting the snow. "Let me in, Dominic. Please. Invite me in." He seems smaller, now, crept closer to the bars and his fingers slide up into Dominic's fist where he's involuntary grasped the iron. "Dominic. Dom." Elijah presses his tongue to Dominic's knuckles. "Open the gate."

Dominic frowns, turns, the soles of his boots making gritty crunchy messy sounds in the well-trod slush underfoot, and unwinds his fingers from about the gate and from about Elijah, turns his head last of all. There's a small antechamber to the gate, a tiny room perhaps once occupied by a gatekeeper though most probably for no other reason to shelter from the snow - it takes all the space there is for Dominic to step back with his arm still extended then lower it and turn, slow, towards the other gate, a mirror image of the first. His hands close around the bars of it and he pushes with the weight of his body. There's less snow within the grounds than there is even in the gatehouse - the roof of which has long since crumbled away into spider-webbed rubble - the dense, leathery trees curling their branches up and over the near-invisible path to the door.  
He never remembers the music afterwards but while he plays it's the universe swirling around him; notes like flakes in snowstorm chaos falling and spinning and being borne upward and bearing him upward like it can carry him out of his body, out of the lift and drop and minute increments of his bow arm shifting and drawing out the soundsensemusic and the lip of the violin pressing below his jaw. Against his neck. Thrumming a hollow line along his collar bone and sweat dripping into his eyes and blurring his vision as he opens them to see the music come to life.


	22. Chapter 22

Dominic half-wakes before he hears the gritty scrape of shoes against stone wet with melted snow; his ears open before his eyes and something harsh is digging into his lower back. A slit of painful yellow light slips between his eyelids and there are hands, firm and gentle on his shoulders and gripping to shake, softly, and it takes him a while to realise that the ice kisses of snow dropped over his face and the shaking aren't related; or rather they are. He squints up and twists his head - heavy aching - and the face above him breaks into a somewhat relieved smile. "It's snowing," the smiling mouth says, curving near a candle. "You must have been out here on the steps half the night. Come inside. The next service is at dawn."

The priest introduces himself as Father Astin, and his black is buttoned up high and dusty and has shiny spots of opaque wax on the cuffs. His collar is crisp and the square of black-framed-white is like straight-edged snow. Dominic sits in a pew a row or so forward of halfway and flexes his aching fingers on his thighs, rolls his shoulders and winces as Father Astin hastens towards the altar and an immense bank of candles, melting over one another as if trying to escape the fervent flames.

It isn't as if he hadn't _known_, really. The money had to have come from somewhere; Dominic knows better than most that it doesn't fall from the sky with the snow, no matter how much it always seems to melt away as soon as he touches it. He thinks of the soft, worn envelope pressed beneath the brick on the hearth, carefully brushed free of dust and ash, spotted brown with his own blood.

It ought to be soaked.

He wants to retch up every meal he's ever bought with the money, sleep in the snow for every hobby-horse or work bench he's ever bought and burned with it. He wants to feel the cold-wet-warming of Elijah's mouth, he wants to curl into the icy blankets of his own bed, feel the broken springs through the thin mattress and ache.

He can still feel the imprint of the violin onto his throat when he lifts his head, turns it past the conflagration of the candles towards where the confessional cowers on the far wall, and Elijah is sitting just across the aisle. Dominic can't breathe, the candlelight makes Elijah's skin seem orange like flame and he lifts his head slowly and turns to Dominic, casting half his face in shadow and masking the completion of his brow, furrowed for an instant and his lips pressed tight. Dominic glances up at the stained glass windows; curved-handed saints and haloes like suns all grey and black without the sunlight pushing through them. When he lowers his head again Elijah is sitting beside him.

Father Astin is kneeling, arms outstretched to cup a lighted wick and bend it to another, and Dominic clenches his fists to stop them reaching out or striking. "What are you doing here," he whispers, barely a question with no inflection.

He thinks Elijah might have whispered _"I need you."_ but then again it might have been _"I heard you."_ or even _"I hate you."_ but he can't tell for sure because the maybe-sound is interwoven with the rustling shuffle of Father Astin's robes as he struggles to his feet again, moves to a bank of unlit candles, white and black.

"You have to stop," Dominic says, his throat rebels against him and makes the words grainy and broken. "You have to stop. . ." he can't say it, but Elijah seems to understand nonetheless. Elijah, who Dominic can't even feel with his skin or his ears, who wouldn't even seem to be there if Dominic's eyes were closed. Dominic thinks they must even be breathing in time with each other, until he realises Elijah's not breathing at all.

"I can't," Elijah says and Dominic forces his eyes to stay open, reluctant even to blink though they sting and strain. Elijah's skin seems more white than orange now, and Dominic's heart lurches momentarily as his mind translates the change as the arrival of sunlight, then dismisses it with another quick glance up at the darkened arched windows. "I'll die, Dominic." And Elijah's fingers curl where they rest on his thigh, pale like bone against the dark worn velvet. They feel like ice in Dominic's palm, cold as his own hands are, and he folds his own fingers about them.

"Then only take from me." The glow of the candle light in the church reminds Dominic of the steady brilliance of oil lamps lighting a shopfront like a lantern, gleaming out of a glass window and glittering gold and black letters. He closes his eyes and his body still starts in surprise as Elijah's cold fingers ghost over his skin. Dominic's voice hurts in his throat, as if it's left a path of ash in its wake, dry and sticking and Elijah traces it down to its origin before sliding his hand lower around Dominic's waist and pressing his lips to the spot instead, shifting his hips to press his body closer. His hair is soft between Dominic's fingers, soft and cold like fresh snow only black, and he can feel Elijah's trembling through where his hand cups the curve of Elijah's shoulder. When Elijah bites down Dominic buries his face in Elijah's hair, mouth open there to gasp in the icy dryness of snow, eyelids heavy as he clutches his free hand around Elijah's waist, sees Father Astin nod at him briefly, face twisted in sympathy and hands twisted before him as he walks purposely past them up the aisle; past their obscene embrace, hidden by the shadow of Dominic's jacket, gaping open and Elijah's face against Dominic's breast.

"Promise me," Dominic murmurs as the candlelight bleeds up under his eyelids, and Elijah thrums against him and his hair glows russet strands interwoven with Dominic's lashes. Elijah lifts his head a little, spells the words against the side of Dominic's neck, his lips softer than the violin's, and Dominic shivers with cold loss when he leaves.

Dawn arrives to take his place and the air in the church is stifling, heavy with candle wax and columns of spinning, brightly coloured dust motes caught in the beams of light rising through the windows. Dominic screws his eyes up before he leaves, head ducked against the sunrise as the church doors open before him and he brushes past the morning's most pious souls on his way out.


	23. Chapter 23

Dominic lurches back, feeling the still air jerk and stutter as the wrought iron gates shudder and thrum with the weight and fury thrown against them. His breath panics and tries to flee whitely, filling the air around him and his knees feel like they want to drop into the snow as he stares, riveted, at the red gums white slick teeth _sharp_, lips peeled, pressing between the black bars. The dogs pull their muzzles back after a few minutes of spitting snarling barking, but Dominic still doesn't move, stays frozen to the spot as they pace around on the black-seeded snow just within the gate, huge shoulders hunched and enlarged with spiked fur.

The smaller gate - the one he usually uses - is locked as well; some inner mechanism he can't see, even after he's dared to step oh-so-slowly closer to it, running his hands over the cold metal, no keyhole in sight. The second gate makes his eyes hurt; bars shifting difficultly behind and within and around the lines of the first's as he cranes his neck to try and see within.

The trees huddle close together, clamouring near the outer wall but taller than he'd thought they were at night, and though the air is cold and pressing close and still around him again, the spear-head leaves flicker and flit, white underbellies flashing like snow.

His hands linger on the black bars and the dogs bare their teeth at him as he glances over his shoulder, hastening away, although his feet drag in the snow and his heels ache.  
His chest hurts. He presses two cold fingertips against the bite marks, standing still in the street with his head bowed, as if he's searching for something he's forgotten in his breast pocket. The crowd is loud and eager around him, grating and sharp-edged, rolling out of the way and flooding back in, brown and obscene, as ornate carriages push their way through with polished wood panels like his violin. He has money. Not on him, but pressed tight like a dried flowers under the brick on his hearth. He thinks he might burn the table tonight, but he isn't sure if he wants to go back there at all; the air seems less cold, perhaps, breathing in and all around him than it does creeping icy tendrils in over the sharp edges of a broken window.

He could afford it. Afford to feel the slick smooth surface with the flaunted curves, and the red-head grain and lips and curve of her neck. Fragile bridge and _f_ holes with curved edges so his fingers could almost slip creep into her belly, blunt and square.

He sees rigid navy spilt heavy in the crowd up ahead, moving against the tide, and he turns and pushes back against it himself, pulling his cap down and shoving his hands in his pockets, moving fast but not so fast as to attract attention, ducking into a gaping alleyway where the crowd is thickest.

*

As she bows her head to descend the stairs, all the light in the room - flickering candles, lanterns in each corner, the reflection of firelight off the gleaming panels of the borrowed violin - gathers together in her hair and when she lifts her chin again it's like a headdress of stars, golden. "A different rhythm tonight," she murmurs, and her voice is low and melodious, many shining particles vibrating softly together, deep, like rich, fresh earth. "And a different key." Her mouth curves up slightly and Dominic's lips tremble in the air above the back of her hand for a moment, her skin icy but for the fat gold ring that leaves a welt on Dominic's fingers that he doesn't notice until much later; sweat stinging as they curve over taut strings. His chest hurts.

He tries to keep his eyes open but the air in the room fills with music, miniscule motes of it keening and clamouring and humming and glinting densely and he can't see through it properly, though sometimes the notes cling to shapes; a curved shoulder or exposed neck. He's not sure if there're any candles still lit in the room but the back of his neck is sticky sweaty with fire-heat and the air glows, furnace-like with hot coal bodies he can't see through the haze. The music lifts higher, scrapes harsher and the air smells like heated rosin as he pulls the bow back and pushes forward again, harder, and has to close his eyes.

*

"Don't go tonight."

Geoffrey starts, fumbling with his shirt buttons and pulling the gaping edges over each other hurriedly, then looking up towards the doorway and relaxing again. "Mam, it's my _job_. Now can't a man have some privacy?"

Usually she'd grin at that title, in a fond, infuriating way, and lean in close to pinch his cheek and tell him he had nothing she hadn't seen in his nappies, and the difference this time unsettles him. "It's not _right_ Geoffrey," her voice is barely above a whisper, eyes bright and set deep beneath anxious brows. She steps forward, almost hesitantly, and wraps her arms tight around her middle. He frowns, turns away so he can get his coat, hunched over the straight-backed chair at the end of his bed, and avoids her gaze. "Stay here. No one says you have to go. Stay. Please."

"Mam!" his voice cracks a little, fracturing somewhere between pleading and outraged, "You knew I'd have to do these kind of things as a police officer. And I can't just quit!" She flinches, lowers her eyes. He continues more softly. "How would we afford to eat? To live?" He pulls on his jacket roughly, pushing the brass buttons through the slits in the coarse navy fabric. "And besides, the Inspector is saying I have to go. I have to obey my superiors, mam."

"But who's telling him to go?" she makes a movement like she's about to reach up and grip his sleeve, so he skirts away, pulling open the shaking creaking walnut wood door of the looming wardrobe in the corner of the tiny room, pretending to search its gullet for something and hiding his face in it instead. "Geoffrey, _please_..."

He pulls on his boots in the hall again and she fidgets at the hall table. The skin of her fingers is loose but shrunk tight around the swollen knuckles, brittle bones; fingernails ridged and fingertips calloused with hard work. He frowns. "It'll be all right," he says, heels settling back into the stiff leather as he carefully wraps his arms about her bird-frail shoulders.

She shakes her head against his chest. "It ain't just rumour, Geoff," she murmurs. "Something's out there. Something _wrong_. We shouldn't be meddling."

"But people have been _killed_ mam..."

"Not _our_ people!" her arms squeeze tight about his waist. "What would become of me if something were to happen to you? I'm too old to get work, even if there were work going. I can barely even lift the firewood for my own fire."

"It's my _job_, mam," he says again, a litany that's beginning to hurt his throat and lose its meaning before it reaches his lips, a small jumble of meaningless sounds cradled in his tongue. He swallows hard. "It'll be all right."

He has to unwrap her arms from about him, pressing her hands together - skin cold and folded under his fingertips - before smiling into her watery eyes and stepping out into the cold. A thick layer of snow crunches underfoot, blown in on the front doorstep under the narrow roof-edge, reaching for him with icicle fingers frozen diagonal in the wind.


	24. Chapter 24

Geoffrey can't take his eyes off the blur-curve of white, dog-eared pages as they arc between Inspector Bean's thumbs; vein-cracks in the black cover where it's been folded and bent back into place. The end of the Inspector's pencil - poking out from his breast poked at a hurried angle - is pocked with tiny indents, soft wood pressed inward and splintering.

Geoffrey's cold, and his eyelids are heavy like the leaden night sky drooping down over the softness of the snow. He can't stop thinking about his bed, about the way it would creak and rock a little as he'd stretch his feet down to the end, forging through the warming sheets to where his mam would've put the bed irons, heated on the fire and slipped in just before he gets home.

Inspector Bean hisses suddenly, grips Geoffrey's arm. "Look there!"

Geoffrey holds his breath, muscles in his forearms tensing against his belly as he clenches his fists, peers into the white-freckled darkness. "Sir," he murmurs, painfully quiet, "I don't--" The Inspector hisses him into silence again. After a moment Bean's fingers release him and the taut wire strung through Geoffrey's shoulders loosens.

"Maybe he saw us," the Inspector murmurs, and curls the notebook up to fit the inner curve of his fist. The paper crackles. "He'll not get away so easily this time." He shoves the notebook into his breast pocket, stressed paper warring against the pencil and buckling. "Stay here. Watch the house." He slogs off through the snow; disappearing somewhere before the far lamp-light, and Geoffrey shivers.

The snow has long since buried the slivers of glass, but the ragged curtains still flutter above. Every so often the movement catches his eye and he starts, stares, hold his breath before releasing relief in a white cloud when he realises anew what it is. He unfolds his hands from where they're clamped under his arms and attempts to transfer some of the desperate heat to his ears, pressing them between fingers and the heels of his hands and sounding like warm snow. His wrists cross over his eyes at one point, flicker flap black of his too-big cuffs masking it at first, but after a moment he freezes, eyes straining.

There's very little light but for what it gathered and reflected by the snow, and so the doorway of the house - which seems to have grown like a plant constricted by its neighbours, up, and deformed - seems to be no more than a shallow grave of blackness, upright, like ink spilt in his breast pocket. He can draw in the simple carved lines of the door itself from his memory of the last clinging drips of moonlight, hours beforehand; but he knows that the porch itself is too narrow for someone to shelter under, at least too narrow for someone to shelter under and sink within its shadow and not be seen.

He steps forward, almost involuntarily, and his foot sinks into the snow half-way over the boot. It hurts to breathe as if the cold air has frozen a band around his chest and every beat of his heart is like a fist trying to pound its way out of him. He wants to go home but he's out of the shelter of the alleyway opposite, now, out in the open and the darkness seems to roil in the doorway, shift like something struggling out of the depths of wet blackness, limbs curved outwards in supplication and an attempt not to drown. He takes another step forward.

"Hello," the girl says softly when he's close enough to see the whites of her eyes reflecting the glimmer-glow of the snow. Her mouth is red and he's choking on his breath; it fills his mouth and throat solidly enough to make him gasp and gag desperately. She's wearing sandals, brown leather banding white feet and he doesn't look up until she presses hot fingers beneath his chin and he wants to go home and his eyes slide over hers and sees that, oh, that's why he didn't see her at first, because the door is open a little so she must have come from inside.

"Aren't _you_ precious?" she purrs, and grins and strokes the pounding of his heart in a long line down the side of his throat and something in his uniform wants to muster up enough indignation to inform her that no, he isn't precious, he's an officer of the _law_; but the rest of what's inside his uniform just wants to crawl slickly out of his skin and melt the snow around them. He swallows against her hand and she makes a small sound of delight and he can't look at her mouth because he wants to go _home_.

Something drops from a roof nearby; he catches the movement on the edge of sight and his eyes roll away from her in distress, a flicker flurry of rust blood movement like a fan as she turns and he sees something gleaming white from the shadows and then he's shaking but alone.

*

Dominic feels as if he's moving in slow motion, underwater like the light is liquid, thick and red and sticky. He strains against it, clamps the violin between his clenched jaw and aching shoulder with sweat creeping beneath his eyelids, smell and taste of salt and copper and the harsh scrape of bow against string, burred sound grating against him painfully. But oh, it makes him numb to everything else when the white leaves flutter overhead and it him feels as if he's being buried in snow; stars wheeling like snowflakes never to descend and cover him completely, fading as the sky lightens, limbs and hands feeling so light as if he's floating up and it's easy enough to believe when his skin is numb against all sensation.

She smiles at him and he's borne along the buoyant current for an eternity; the music has become his breath and he survives on its crucial rhythm, slowing and quickening, exhausting and reviving him over centuries, millennia, a glut of life that he suffocates without in the cold sunlight which drops shards of ice over his body that melt when he walks down those steps again and sees her, walks into his own little pocket of fevered darkness and plays.

*

Elijah's dying again.


	25. Chapter 25

Claudia sometimes likes to pretend that she is an orphan; that her mama and papa aren't _really_ her mama and papa -- that she'd been found on their doorstep when she was a babe, abandoned by her _real_ mother, who was a queen, perhaps, and probably in terrible danger. Mama doesn't really understand; she tells Claudia stories about girls with red cloaks and children who cut off their fingers, but Claudia prefers to make up her own tales to keep herself awake in the long hours before papa gets home each night. Mama always waits in the rocking chair before the stove after she's put Claudia to bed but Claudia waits as well, curling the blankets up under her chin and thinking about the fine clothes she'd get to wear (and the fine foods she'd get to eat, and she could have a little _puppy_, all of her own; the farrier down the street has a new litter of mongrels and she could have her pick of any one of them if she were a princess) until she hears the front door creak open and the _cl-clunk_ as papa puts down his old leather case and the tiny burst of cold that's slipped in with him reaches her bed and she curls her toes around the soft murmurs that mama and papa make. Papa understands, though. Papa even plays her fanfares on his trumpet, usually when mama's rubbing the skin half-off her face or her ears or her neck and the wash-water's horribly _cold_ and her pockets are clicking with chipped, polished marbles, heavy in their urgency to be outside. Papa was an orphan and sometimes when he gets home and she's pretending to be asleep she feels the bed dip down beside her (it never seems to creak when _he's_ sitting on it) and her loosely-curled fist is carefully unfurled by warm fingers to fit a treasure into it; a sugar-cake or scrap of silk, torn off by clumsy boots on the dance floor but royal between her fingertips. One day, when she's queen, she'll buy mama a dress made of silk, flowing like water around her and her hair all done up in diamonds to match her name; and she'll buy papa a new case for his trumpet, one of shiny black leather which smells like new boots before you put your feet in them. Papa will only have to play in the day, then, and mama won't have to wait up to--

She stops suddenly, holds her breath as she hears something which is _not_ papa, something which is scratching at the door. It's too early for papa, anyway; she's not yet sunk into the almost-dream of her thoughts that slip away into sleep as she hears their voices, she's too _awake_ and besides, the sound of papa's arrival is metal key-in-lock and soft footsteps; not the hurried creak of protest from mama's chair as she pushes herself up.

Claudia hears the door open, feels the gust of cold moments later and pulls the blanket up higher under her chin as it doesn't abate; bringing with it light, desperate voices. _"Little candles,"_ she thinks she hears; and Mama's voice then, with a precious thread of concern tangled with unsureness and the creak-thud of the door closing again and _mama?_ Claudia's lips are pressed tight, jaw clenched, but the imploration wavers in her throat silently as she hears her mother's soft cry; a sound more of grief than surprise. Claudia squeezes her eyes shut as the half-open door separating the bedroom from the rest of the house swings slowly inwards, and the bed hardly shifts as something settles on it but her eyes fly open as something icy grazes her cheek.

"Oh!" the mouth says softly, red lips sharp white smile, smooth brows lowering like the ghost of concern. The hand strokes down the side of Claudia's face, settles at her throat like snow. She represses a shudder, holding herself very still. Her eyes flit away from the pale dark-rust-framed face as something moves past the doorway and she catches a glimpse of velvet green before the girl's voice draws her attention back. "A little child! A dear, dear little child!" Claudia's face is veiled with dried blood cold hair all of a sudden, and fingers like icy bones digging into her shoulders and wetness beneath her chin. She struggles at last, resisting the embrace, a mockery of comfort, but-- "We'll take care of you, darling. My dear little child. Let me tell you a story."

*

Dying isn't something Elijah's ever been able to forget, no matter how much he's tried to drown the memory in the thick, salty forgetfulness of blood. It's less like a re-living this time, though; he's cold, colder than he's been in centuries whereas last time it was more of a conflagration, a burning crawling with agonising speed through his empty veins, barbed flame roiling under his skin.

The snowflakes drift down on him like embers and he edges bone-fingers into the cracks between the mortar on the old monument, curling close and clinging into the stone like it can afford him some kind of shelter. The headstones stand aloof around him, above him, and he wants to burrow down into the embrace of the earth beneath him, deep enough for heat and

_Hungry_. He's so hungry and the graveyard doesn't get any mortal visitors at this time of night; though earlier on there might have been a few lone mourners, black veils of despair and not enough fur wrapped around them to resist the icy blanket of cold, looking for death where death had already been and gone.

Or not yet arrived, in Elijah's case, as he presses his face, mouth, against the weather-rough stone, desperate for a remnant of former heat, a drop spilled carelessly last time when he was already satiated.

There's little hope left for the meeting he craves, _needs_; and a black hopelessness struggles up through the hunger-haze with the bitter knowledge that he'd wasted the first few weeks coming here when he still had the strength to seek Dominic out, to trust the instincts that had meant his survival for years beyond count.

The churchyard is empty but for the dead, and Elijah's alone.

*

"Forgive me, father," Geoffrey's voice is hesitant; particles of nervousness flittering in his throat and making him swallow suddenly, as if he's choking on his words.

Mam had always taken him to church on Sundays; but that was before it had gotten so cold, and before the rheumatism in her wrists and knees shackled her to the dusty grease-burnished kitchen, the smoky coals of the kitchen stove. Before Geoffrey had joined the police force, working six days a week to keep her teapot warm and her blood moving, before Geoffrey took to resting on the seventh day. Before Inspector Bean had expected Constable Shawcross to work the seventh day with him, to lurk in shadows like black snow-drifts and watch for icy figures that Geoffrey wasn't quite sure had nothing to do with the coloured-ice windows he can still feel staring down at him now, even through the dense, beeswax-smelling wood of the confessional.

The priest clears his throat unobtrusively on the other side of the grill; Geoffrey's head jerks up a little, his eyes flickering self-consciously over what he can see through the dust-woven trefoil gaps in the barrier between them; dusty black and sharp white collar, pink chin, blurred face. He looks away hurriedly. He ain't done nothing _wrong_...

A pointed sigh. "Is something troubling you, son?"

Geoffrey wonders if the priest recognises his voice; deeper but with the same tremulous uncertainty as the boy with big ears who sat with his feet dangling, stuttering about the girl across the road, years past now like sunlight buried under snow. "I... Yes, father."

Another patient silence.

"Is there something you'd like to confess?"

But it's not as if he's _sinned_, he's just -- "I don't know what to do, father. I'm stuck between a rock and hard place, y'see, I..." Geoffrey squirmed a little, thinking of Inspector Bean's fervent, almost feverish enthusiasm; and the Commissioner's face through his thick cloud of tobacco smoke, eyes narrowed and elbow jerked out imperiously, the tips of his fingers resting in his pocket below his impressive belly. Any more stuck, Geoffrey thought wryly with more than a little desperation, and he'd lose his buttons from trying to wriggle out.

"A conflict of moral obligations?"

"More like duty, I'd say father," Geoffrey says, relieved to have the words plucked out of his mouth. He may not be all that well learned with his numbers and letters; no more than his mam could teach him in the oily orange light of the greasy-paned kitchen lamp; but he knows his right from wrong. At least, he's always thought he had.

The priest makes a soft sound of understanding and Geoffrey fidgets a little, kneads the heel of his palm, twisting the soft pad of flesh with the opposite thumb and fore-finger knuckle. "And you don't know which is more important?"

"Well, father," Geoffrey continues. "It's like on the one side, I have my duty that I've sworn to... sworn to obey. And on the other side I have promises that I've made... only not really promises. A different _kind_ of duty, if you see what I mean. Father."

The priest makes another sound, Geoffrey sees him move a little through the blurred grill, a slow, easy sway to one side and then the other.

"To believe," the priest says at length, his voice steady, thoughtful. "In a higher power, is to be in conflict." Geoffrey frowns a little, concentrating hard. "Belief in a higher power means submission to a higher power - and therein lies the conflict: between one's duty to oneself and one's duty to one's superior."

Geoffrey opens his mouth to speak, closes it again. The priest is silent for another moment, as if sensing Geoffrey's discomfort, before continuing in his slow, assured voice.

"To overcome this conflict one must recognise the existence of the higher power within oneself - our will is our own, but we are not our own... We govern our own actions but not the circumstances that drive us to take action."

Geoffrey swallows hard, the bones in his hands was aching where he twists them together. "So I'm being... tested?"

"It is not my place to define the will of my superior," the priest says serenely, and Geoffrey's brows crumple up. His head hurts.

"But... Which duty am I bound to?"

"That is not for me to say," the priest's voice as steady and unflickering in purpose as a still candle flame. "The answer is as much within you as it is within everything in this world, seen and unseen, bound to its creator. You will know it when you make the right choice."  
He'd shivered inside the church but the air outside is icy, and the wind claws him at through his greatcoat and into the coarse blue uniform, scraping shudders along his ribs and knees. It's not snowing yet; too early in the night and not cold enough, though he's experienced enough winter nights to know that the window for snow will be narrow; gauging by the increasing numbness of his lips, nose, ears, the night will get colder yet, freeze the very air itself.

The trees in the churchyard have long been bare, fallen leaves frozen between the headstones, preserved gold and ochre in ice reminiscent of a wet autumn, now out of sight beneath snow drifts. Something flickers between the headstones, and Geoffrey pauses halfway down the church steps to look again, still angel faces with black-stain tears frozen forever in their postures of grief, wings broken or missing entirely. The wind doubles back suddenly, screaming through the empty streets, and Geoffrey shudders, folding his coat closer about him and clamping his hands under his arms before hurrying out of the churchyard.


	26. Chapter 26

He will go.

*

When Dominic was younger he'd accompany his father on trips to the coast; following the river through the green country that wouldn't turn brown then black and white and cobble-stoned for several years yet. He'd stand in his too-big boots, too-big ears and coat sleeves halfway up his forearms, on the huge, rotting wood planks of the docks; his wrist curled around the pack mare's lead rope as she ground her jaw around one of their precious apples and he did the same. He would barely see his father for the duration of their stay in the waterside town - never more than a day - but would stand and watch the streets while the hours ticked past. The wood was slimy and dark under the toe of his boot, ingrained with mud and stench.

One visit he traded his apple for a story from a man who lurched alarmingly close; a man whose voice curled around his words in a way that wasn't quite right but wasn't _wrong_ either, and from then on the sound of the water there, oily waves slapping against the black docks, always put him in mind of it. _Selkie folk_. He watched the water, after that, half-closed his eyes and imagined the water warmer than it was and him without his heavy boots or coat tight across his shoulders, imagined the water closing in around him and no coldness wetness (_pain_), just that stuttering elation in his chest at a glimpse of pale skin, huge eyes, wavering strands of hair that _weren't_ seaweed.

Inadvertently riding the river the last hundred yards or so into the town one year hadn't stopped his fantastical longing (_mud slip fall cold wet hand wet ice shock breathe can't breathe skin face cold numb ice splutter choke breathe can't breathe can't stand can't move move ice wet cold wet **drown**_), despite the fact that it had proven nothing except that perhaps Dominic would be more safe at home, this year, helping his mam with the shepherding even if there were only a few left in their meagre flock; she's getting old, Dommie-lad, and can't be left on her own so much anymore. The river had frozen over by the time his father made the third trip after that. Dominic never forgot the shock of cold, the burst of fear/excitement and the slick tongues of the river licking over his face and the rush of bubbles and currents and icy claws into his eyes as he rolled them to see, to _look_, even in that moment of terror...

But this is warm. Hot. His eyes are squeezed closed and he thinks his skin might be melting over his face, trickling tongues of liquid that creep over the curve of his lip saltily. The _selkie_ skin in his childhood imagination slip-slide-tumbles into something different, from pale white-blue-green to red and gold and it doesn't make him want it less and he opens his eyes, floundering with the movement of his bow over strings to stay afloat, straining to catch a glimpse of a figure as the heat-bubbles-currents whip around him, sink around him, he can almost see it--

"Dominic."

He thinks he might be losing his mind. Might have lost his mind, but for this: her hand resting just below the cuff on his right arm. She draws him forward, down, and he's genuinely surprised when his feet don't sink into the steps, dull sound eddying around his ankles. Her voice sounds like they're underwater. He's not sure he can breathe.

*

He will go, slowly, edging along the shadows that lean against the sides of the buildings, coal-black and hard darkness nothing like the ice shards of moonlight on the rooftops. He can sense stray cats, dogs, birds sheltering in the belfries, sense them sense him and skirt away around him and his pride might be wounded at that (at the memory of slipping padding snarling biting drinking) but the slow, fat rhythm beating down at him through the cold stone is enough to drive everything from his mind.

Almost everything.

He knows, now. He's known all along and maybe there's a dull ache of regret, not sharp but piercing in its familiarity (so long, now, but so close still), as if the fever of feeding is clearing from his mind and he remembers, he _knows_, without the ridiculous pride that started this, the pride that he has to blame for all of this. _All of this._

*

He's so tired. The manor is like some thick-swaddling dream wrapped in so close around him like he's drowning in his own body, his own flesh; red heaving walls and currents of heat, of sound, the smell of hot copper. There are grooves in his fingertips where the violin strings have pressed into them, they feel huge when he touches them to his lip, his jaw. He's almost surprised to find his skin is warm, his breath (_breath_) moist.

She smiles as she looks at him, close-mouthed, her cheekbones and red lips, white (_golden_) skin in stark relief to the warm darkness pushing in from behind her. It feels strange, standing here; like his world has been reversed (_again_), on the opposite side of the sunken, carpeted square into one of the recesses opposite where he usually plays. Where his eyes usually avoid. She's speaking. The grooves feel deeper against the scars over his heart. His bow hand trembles.

"Do you like it here, Dominic?" the words move slowly through the air, little particles of sound flittering through that low vibration and into his skin. He nods, the movement not shaking away the sense of something clinging to his face. Building up. Suffocating. He presses his hand harder against his chest, until it hurts. She watches, her eyes seeming to draw in the muffled light rather than reflecting it.

He can hear her smile more than anything else and he clings to that though it doesn't make any sense until he realises the softsharp sounds edging from between the red lips are words, words whose cadence curl around his neck almost tenderly, cradle the nape and comfort, somehow, draw him close and he feels as if he could relax entirely in this soft darkness, relax and _yield_ with no more strength left...

_"...as fortunate as you,"_ she's saying, and it's as if her voice is the eager torch that lights each waiting lamp along the cobble-stoned pathways of his mind; his awareness following on, unwilling to trust the darkness outside the softly defined circles of tainted gold. _"Not all would be so kind as to invite you in, as we have here,"_ the rhythm somehow matching the rise and fall of his chest, slow, his heartbeat, _"nor are many so gracious as to offer us what you have offered us, for these past nights."_ His fingers clench convulsively around the phantom pain of the violin neck; left behind on the red-reflecting piano on the opposite side of the room, miles away. _"Some would seek to take what you have given..."_

She's taller than him but when her lashes lower she seems to look up at him through them and his heart lurches forward, pulling out words of reassurance as if on a baited string: _Surely not Never Who would **Please, lady**_ though he's not sure he's spoken aloud; the only thing he's ever wanted is for her to touch him and yet he's sure he'd break apart at the feel of her (_mouth_) against his skin, break apart inwards, crumple and sink back.

_"There are others who have taken from you already."_

Closer, dizzyingly. Her words against his skin in the minute shifting of molecules as her lips purse about them; no breath touches the side of his neck.

_"He has taken from us also. One of my children... destroyed. As he will destroy you, Dominic."_

_He can't breathe._ He can't feel, feel anything, and wonders at the way sensation seeps from his limbs, his skin, and drains inwards to fist in a tight clench around his heart. His fingernails bite into the palm of his hand and he doesn't want her to touch him, knows he couldn't bear it, because his skin wants to fall away from his body at the memory of a lithe body against his, (_warm_) cold skin; wet mouth on his neck, wrist, thigh.

_"Elijah took him,"_ he can no longer hear her voice, it is something sibilant like the rustling of paper - manuscript or money - coming from inside him. _"Like a lover, devoted to him..."_ \-- her touch on his throat, burning, but he's sweating icily, a sheen of it frozen over him -- _"... but Elijah took all, there was nothing left._

"He will take you. Destroy you. There will be nothing left." _For me_, her unspoken words in the dense silence of the aftermath, a rushing in Dom's ears that he has to break or _die_ and he cannot look at her, cannot breathe...  
The cold air tears into him with the rhythm of sobs that he can't hear; only the scrape-tinkle of the ice-sheathed leaves above his head as he stumbles down the steps and towards the gates, heated sensation rushing back into his limbs and forearms aching as he slams through the first gate then comes more gently to a rest against the second, black iron cold against his forehead but doing nothing to soothe the whirling chaos within it, bars rough in his fists after his delicate cradling of the violin, and bow.


	27. Chapter 27

The sound of snow crunching underfoot unfurls claws along the back of Dominic's neck, razor-edged; cold and settling heavy weights around his ankles, numbing his feet and making him stumble in the white filth suffocating the ground like mud. Everything is still and clear, so clear that it cuts into his lungs and the air is dense like pristine water, making his breath fall heavy and white over his chin like age. His understanding is glacial; immense and inevitable yet dangerously slow and caustic against the heat of his blood, his thoughts skidding and tumbling against the treacherous cobblestones of her words that he so desperately seeks to secure footing on.

_You will have nothing._ Whispered in _her_ voice, salty flood of it into his mouth as he grits his teeth and wants to spit, imagines it dark and hot against the obstinate, cold white, grits his teeth in a grimace and bows his head, leans forward into the frozen air, what feels like frozen time with the snow slowing his movement and his thoughts trying to struggle onward and failing. _Nothing._  
There's snow in the front hall, blown in from the street and the door of his room is open. The stubborn drag of time suddenly snaps up behind him, whirls forward and around him like heat from a fire at his back. The grill of his fire is empty, though, and the only sound and movement in the room outside the muffled chaos of the awareness which swirls around Dominic like a proxy skin is coming from behind the half-ruined armchair, rising like an iceberg from the dusty slush of wreckage lying about the abandoned room; a slow, measured tapping. Familiarity and new knowledge makes something bitter roil up from his belly to his throat, makes his body thrum with something unfamiliar and feverish, and he steps forward as icy heat whips over his skin and clenches his fists and jaw; words trying to push past teeth incoherently, words to demand and deconstruct, words to tear and _bite_

words that slip and fall back into him at the impact of his knees thudding against the unyielding floorboards, breath swelling in his chest in the timeless space between his heartbeats as his hand moves, opens, closes around the cold, pale hand that idly taps his bow against the floor, white horsehairs black and clotted with blood.

"_Dom_," Billy breathes, the corner of his mouth tilting up weakly. His eyelids dip, droop; his fingers twitch in Dominic's palm. "Dom."

Bile, hot and acidic rises to Dominic's gullet, he feels it creep up measure by measure as his awareness snaps back to him almost violently, a sensory onslaught in the cold, still room. Billy's melting, red from his throat and into the weave of his open-necked shirt and the stench of wet copper and sweat and ice is overpowering. Wounds familiar as Dominic's rust-spotted mirror but harsher, torn. The stick is slick against the heel of Dominic's palm, gummy with congealed blood and there're hints of ice at the corners of Billy's eyes as he looks up and focuses on Dominic's face.

"It's too late," Billy whispers. "I was too late."

"Too late for what?" Dom croaks, a bow dry and harsh against the strings of his throat.

"They're gone, Dom, there was nothing--" Billy swallows, lashes fluttering. Bleeding. _Nothing_. "I was too late, I didn't know, I left it too long..." The words seep out of Billy, slow and inexorable, fatal. Dom's hand is white-knuckled on his shoulder. Billy breathes out shallowly, shakily, opens his eyes again, irises pale pale green as if the colour leaking out of him was linked to more than just his heart. "I just wish--"

Dom's next breath is agonised and alone, the skin of Billy's face cold against his fingertips and he _can't_, his heart aches; he leaves Billy's eyes staring blankly into the empty darkness of the ruined room. He leaves.  
_It's not too late._ There's too much white outside but he can't look back at the black hollows his feet leave in the snow, can't look down at the dark blood sealing the bow in his fist; just careen on with ice creeping up within him to suffocate the heated confusion of earlier. The city crouches, poised and impervious around him, and the air is frozen, too still for snow and slicing into him with every movement he makes, stumbling limbs and the hoarse crunch of snow underfoot, the world too close to echo. It's not too late and it's always been too late, since the reflection within that dark alley drew him in, light gleaming where it ought to have been dark. But it's not too late. He could. He will... He _wants_\--

Gold ahead of him; warm, not reflecting the cold white of snow. Gold against his fist, around his fist, gold bleeding red into the white snow beneath the shop window before he's realised what's happened, as if the air he's tried to reach through were solid and he was repelled. His violin, glowing like a heart in the shopfront and incomplete without what's clenched in his fist, broken glass dull in the snow now with broken black and gold letters like a cacophony of musical notes. Dominic tries to still his breath, unclasps his hands, slick now with more colour, fingers tangled in horsehair. The bow trembles as he reaches his free hand through the jagged remains of the window, dense air within warmer and sparking the fresh cuts on his knuckles to tingle with defrosting sensation, the glass underfoot not crunching but pressing down into the thick snow.

*

The gates swing open before him, their low groan muffled by the thrum vibrating through the black iron, and the smell curls out and around him, cold and rotten, catching at the back of his throat, making his mouth water and stomach turn. He can hear the trees' low murmur above him as he treads cautiously through their decomposing waste towards the door. Each step sends an aching strand of vibration up through his heels, stronger as he approaches the house, half-crawling up the steps, harsh and scaled beneath his palms.

"Elijah." The girl leaning in the doorway bares her teeth sharply, any vestiges of goodwill lost in the curl of her lip. Elijah's fingers dig into the delicate flesh of his ears, palms pressing hard against the low, painful vibration emanating from the house, a subterranean roar, discordant and scraping furrows along the inside of his skull. Her mouth moves again and she stands aside; he stumbles forward through the agony of sound to step over the threshold and into the pocket of heat and muffled sound.

It's as if time and being have been condensed, crammed into the comparatively small containment of the foyer and hallways, dark, grainy alcoves and chambers that make up the manor; it's been centuries since Elijah's had to breathe and yet he feels suffocated, shackled by the heavy air and the leaden sound that make his teeth ache on the edge of pain.

Movement in the alcoves on either side of him carves hollow spaces into the air itself, scarcely discernable from the velvet folds of blood-red drapery that frame the archways. Statues with marble skin, warmer than his own, glow slickly in the light, darker the closer he gets, muscles in his thighs trembling as the weight of the sound gets heavier.

The steps down into the shallow bath in the centre of the room send jolts through his knees but he locks the joints, refusing to buckle, though the dark red that swirls about his calves threatens to wrap around and pull him under. Her chin is raised, as is his, though firm where his is trembling; all about her is the stench of decay and the fresh alarm of blood.

Her voice silences all else as she speaks, though the musicians continue to play, as if in slow motion, the notes moving through the currents of air like eddies in the rushing roar of her voice. "I knew you would return." She tilts her head further, as if she can look down upon him from higher than where her throne sets her. "Crawling back to me."

He keeps his face impassive, torn between the urge to snarl and spit and the urge to fawn at her knees and suck the moisture from her soaked skirts. "You will never have the pleasure of me kneeling before you."

Her lip curls. "Such uncivil words from one so princely," she says, smooth scorn, "yet such noble language for one so savage." A pause, and she lifts her hands slowly from her lap, rings glinting viciously in the dim light, to rest them on the arms of the throne. "Perhaps unfortunately for you, _never_ is a word that holds no meaning for those such as I."

"Such as I also, then," barely able to keep it from being a snarl, his teeth clenching, tighter and to the point of pain as her low laugh oozes out, stops abruptly as he speaks again; "we share the same blood, we are the same."

"_I share blood with no one_," the red density curling up around his thighs to his hips, weighing him down, heavier; her teeth glinting like knives as she speaks, "_and all blood is mine. You _will_ come to me. The beginning is mine, as is the end. You will come to me._"

"You have destroyed me already and you seek to do so a second time, witch," he spits, red snakes coiling around his waist, crushing his ribs, "you steal what I have claimed for my own because you wish to consume _all_." The silence in the manor is spreading out, crushing in, filling his mouth and choking him.

"I have something that you have not," her voice is light, sing-song. Ageless. She holds out her hand, opens it. He falls. "A key."

*

Dominic's lost.

The blank faces of the stone houses mock him with their imperviousness, the same refrain over and over as he stumbles through the snow, violin clutched to his breast, bow in his fist.

The city is silent. The winter silenced many things but also allowed smaller sounds to be heard; the minor pinprick harmony of the bats wheeling invisibly above, the crackling chiming of icicles forming on lintels, the cries and shudders of those quickening and dying within the dark stone houses. Tonight there is no sound, and Dominic is lost as if he is blind, and the stark contrast of the white snow and dark stone is merely a phantasm created by his desperate mind.

He will leave.

He will follow the river until there is no city left, will sound out the path ahead with notes bowed on his fiddle, will warm and secure the space around him with notes bowed on his fiddle.

But the strings are loose. Slack and neglected and the snow wet and cold beneath him though he doesn't remember his legs folding down (doesn't remember ever moving) and his ears are cold though that might be from listening too hard and maybe he's deaf?

His fingers are numb, their joints stiff and sticky from where they were clutched about the bow, and he can barely feel the peg between his fingertips but for the pressure and the strings moan in pained protest as the clotted horsehair slides tentatively against them.

His breath catches, his heart captures the sounds she makes, scolding him for leaving her, more amicable as he gently tightens her strings, flowing into his veins more surely than his own blood, caught in the chambers of his heart and echoing there.

Echoing off the damp stone around them, trickling back almost two-fold and chipping away the blindness from buildings, slowly, flakes of it peeling back and revealing familiarity even as she winds closer about him and slides under the residue left on his skin from what he can only remember as _madness_ and _want_.

He wants her. Her surface is still warm and smooth, slick beneath his touch now with the red coating his hands and her few pure notes aching for a conclusion; he _wants_\--

Dominic stumbles upright again, first few steps sinking into the snow to almost mid-calf until momentum allows him to move forward relatively unhindered. The violin swings by his hip, bow clenched firmly in his other fist, crossing his chest like a gun-strap.  
The city disappears behind him when the gates appear, posts thrusting upwards like fangs with a drooping spider-web line of bars between them, black against the grey pre-dawn sky. Dominic's breath is loud in his own ears and his violin warm in his hand, cuts from the broken window still shedding red tears around his clenched fist. The closer he gets, the thicker the snow seems to get, as if he's wading through sand, and the manor seems to get larger, as if engorged, so that by the time he reaches the gate the white underbellies of the leaves on the veritable forest between the gate and the house itself are clearly visible to him as he looks up, hands not relenting their grip but his forehead pressed against the cold iron, mesmerised as they move in the still air. The almost-halo of sunrise around the black of the manor finally spurs him to move again, wanting to avoid the savage snarls that sunlight brings to this place, his chest full of the adamant voice of his violin.

It takes a moment for his eyes to re-adjust from the icy glow of the snow to the darkness in the space between the two smaller gates, a moment longer to perceive amidst the dark ivy leaves something lighter, as if a patch of snow has remained untrodden throughout traffic of the night. The voice intertwines with the voice of his violin, curled and flowing within him so that he can't hear it as such, can't discern it until white fingers curl about the black bars of the outer gate.

"Dominic," Elijah's voice is barely more than a whisper, the rest of the world a breathless, hushed silence. "Dom. Open the gate."

The stick of the bow grates against the joint of Dominic's thumb as he wrenches at the harsh iron, but it doesn't budge. His fingers fumble against the metal, then ineffectually scrabble at the flat black panel in which the keyhole is set. "Locked," he breathes, his voice rough from lack of speech, and watches Elijah's eyelids slowly slide closed; his throat moving as he swallows. "It's locked." Dominic's fingers move bluntly over the delicately obdurate keyhole. "I don't have the key." The skin of Elijah's face has fine cracks in it, like china, or pottery too long in the kiln; Dominic isn't sure he can breathe.

The snow under Dominic's knees is more like icy mud, and he curls his bow hand around Elijah's on the bar, movement re-opening the cuts there, warm. "Here," he says, throat too thick for words, and Elijah's eyes open. Dominic clenches his hand tighter. "Here." _It's not too late._

Dominic's startled from the sensation of Elijah's cold lips on his knuckles by a sudden tear of sound; barking, and Elijah looks up at him in the growing light and his mouth is red but still pale, as if the blood has soaked into the thick linen weave of crude bed sheets. _It's too late,_ his lips spell, iron cruel against Dom's forehead and pressing harsher, Elijah's fingers like bone in his fist, grinding against the wood of the bow, then, _Not like this,_ mouth so slow and compelling as ever, trembling as the cold sunlight gilds the edges of the topmost ivy leaves in the small space between the gateways.

The violin splinters easily against the solid metal, neck still reverberating from the blow and all up Dominic's forearm, strings twanging slightly and then coiling around the black bars rapidly as he drives it forward before he can think and before the sun can blind his eyes in a chiaroscuro of ice and water and light, feeling the impact up to his shoulder and into his chest. Elijah's mouth opens and he crumbles, fine cracks stretching suddenly and then collapsing before Dominic is even able to withdraw. The bow is a column of ash, soft in Dominic's fist then gone with a shaky breath.

By the time the pale square of sunlight fills the small enclosure, it's started to snow again, covering the scattering of black ash with another layer of white.

*

Grey clouds darken the sky early in the day, wind whipping up after a clear dawn and making Constable Shawcross shrug the collar of his coat up around his ears, woollen scarf scraping roughly against his neck with the movement. He hasn't eaten, hasn't slept, is still tautly-strung and running on energy that makes his limbs tremble and stomach twist. When he blinks he sees the memory of stained red in the white snow, so bright, usually vivid dark blue uniforms dull as they move around it.

He's not sure if the blue will ever be bright again. He doesn't spot it at first, with the black jutting gates distracting him, it's only when he turns his back to the dark threat of the manor that the white-encrusted blue catches Geoffrey's eyes near one of the cowering buildings across the street.

Bean's shoulders are curled and still, his fingers and lips luminescent blue against the white of the snow, unflinching at a sudden flurry of flakes that whip around as the Constable crouches down. Geoffrey almost expects the black leather of the notebook to be warm but any such romantic notion is lost as he struggles to wrestle the notebook from rigid, frozen fingers. As soon as he has hold of it he stands. He has his own pencil. He shakes his feet out of the ankle-deep shackle of snow that they've sunk into and leaves.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Wine on the snow](https://archiveofourown.org/works/217577) by [SharpestRose](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SharpestRose/pseuds/SharpestRose)
  * [Light playing tricks](https://archiveofourown.org/works/217579) by [SharpestRose](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SharpestRose/pseuds/SharpestRose)




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